Most single serving websites are very gimmicky, like telling you you’re awesome, showing you how to spell “definitely”, or playing a fail sound. Some, however, are actually useful.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a single serving site is a one-page website with its own domain name that focuses on doing just ONE thing. These sites are by their very nature limited in scope, and that’s the whole point. They need to be dead simple to use, and most of the time they are just designed to answer a very specific question or perform a simple task.

Here are some of the more useful single serving websites we here at Pingdom have stumbled upon in our wanderings around the Web.

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This week Google launched a new Web community on code.google.com/speed. The goal is to help Web developers speed up their Web applications, but the long-term goal is even more ambitious; to work together to make the Web as a whole a lot faster.

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Here’s some interesting news for all you webmasters and web developers out there. Google has just introduced a tool they call Page Speed that tests a web page based on a set of rules and best practices for fast-loading websites. It then gives you advice on what you can improve to make your website faster. It works as an add-on to Firefox and needs the Firebug extension to work.

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We have performed a survey of the top 10,000 websites on the Internet to find out not just how many of them are using Google Analytics, but also the division between the legacy urchin.js script and the new ga.js script.

We found out two very interesting things.

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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…

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Considering the massive amount of websites that are using Google Analytics it is of course extremely important that the Google Analytics script is always available and responding well so that website visitors will have no problems loading it.

We use Google Analytics ourselves here at Pingdom and think it’s a great tool for keeping track of our visitor traffic. Since we have included the GA script on both our main website and our blog, we were curious to see how well it performs and how reliable it is (uptime wise).

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It’s a common scenario: A new website launches after having built up a lot of hype around its service or product, only to almost immediately crash due to overwhelming traffic. These launch troubles are almost always scalability-related.

We see this happening a lot. It may sound like a luxury problem (wow, too many users!), but think about it: If you’ve created something special and spent lots of effort building up expectations and buzz around your product, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of people finally trying it out, do you?

Here are some real-world launch troubles from 2008, and advice on how to avoid these kinds of problems.

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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.

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On June 23-24, O’Reilly held the 2008 edition of Velocity, a conference focused on web performance and operations. Unfortunately no one from Pingdom was able to attend (much to our great dismay considering the subject matter), but luckily for us the slides for a lot of the presentations have been made public. We have scoured [...]

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A year ago the term “cloud computing” wasn’t even on the radar. Now it’s everywhere. Microsoft is doing it, Amazon is doing it, IBM is doing it, Google is doing it, Sun is doing it, Apple is doing it, HP is doing it, everyone is doing it. We thought this would be interesting in relation [...]

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