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This is what Microsoft’s homepage looked back in 1994 when it was first launched, and its evolution during the following years.
Keep reading for a closer look at the seven first versions of Microsoft.com and some very retro web design.
You may remember our April Fool’s joke this year: SaveIE6.com. Want to hear something cool? The petition on that website now has more than 1,000 signatures. 
As you may have noticed, our April Fool’s joke this year was to take irony into overdrive and launch SaveIE6.com. There simply is no other browser that web developers love to complain more about than IE6, so turning the tables on them (no pun intended) and make a whole site dedicated to praising IE6 seemed like a fun idea.
Luckily for us, irony proved to be alive and well on the Internet. The site has been incredibly well received, and was one of the most retweeted links on Twitter yesterday. If you haven’t checked it out already, you might want to take a look!
We have picked out some of the funniest comments people added to the petition page, all explaining why IE6 is a superior browser… 
Sometimes you just need to take a short break, relax and have fun. A great way to do so is to check out some funny web comics, and we here at Pingdom are big fans of comics that dive into the slightly more geeky aspects of life. Once a tech geek, always a tech geek…
So, sit back and relax, take a few moments to yourself and check out some of the best tech comics around.
Many of the major websites have localized versions of their pages for different countries. Most of the time it’s just a plain translation of their “regular” website (for example Apple Japan, Yahoo Japan and MSN Japan, to name just a few), but sometimes localization is taken a BIG step further.
First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks!
We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we won’t be updating the blog until next Monday (December 29), here is a selection of our very best and most popular posts from 2008 to keep you entertained in the meantime.
JPG, PNG and GIF are the three image formats that websites use for their images. We decided to find out exactly how common each format is, and how large the images of each format tend to be. After analyzing more than 23 million images, we have found some very interesting results.
Sooner or later all websites run into trouble (even Google) or have to perform maintenance that takes them offline. However, there is a big difference between how different websites handle the resulting error or maintenance pages that will have to be shown to the user. Some lighten the mood with jokes, some are dry and to the point, and some drop the ball completely.
We make our living here at Pingdom by monitoring websites for problems, so we tend to stumble across more of these error pages than most people do. This post includes error and maintenance pages for 24 of the most popular Web 2.0 services out there. While two of them can definitely be considered examples of what NOT to do, the other 22 are here to give you plenty of inspiration and hopefully put a smile on your face.
Aside from uptime, website performance is something we talk a lot about here at Pingdom. There are lots of ways to improve the speed of your website, but this post will focus on ways to optimize the size and number of files your website uses, both being important factors affecting the load time.
The files we are talking about are of course the files that are delivered to a visitor when they load your website, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and most important in this case, images.
Since images usually make up most of the size of a website, we will focus the majority of this article on image optimization.
The Pingdom website has been included as one of the examples in The Web Designer’s Idea Book. It is, as the name implies, a guide to themes, trends and styles in website design and was written by Patrick McNeil who also runs the very popular Design Meltdown web design portal. We have a copy of the book and can definitely say that it’s a really cool book, shock full with website inspiration.
