Monday 8th March 2010: If you have a Twitter account and want to let your followers know about your latest score we've added a link to help you out.

On the report summary page click the link "Tweet about this report". You'll be taken to twitter.com, if you're not logged in their system will prompt you to do so. Next you'll see a basic tweet from us ready to go. Make any changes and you're done.

Tweeting Sitemorse scores can be a great way of letting colleagues and customers know of your hard work.

Thursday 19th November 2009: We have added the capability for account holders to "opt-in" to receive an email when audits complete and for the "master" user to add email recipients on their behalf.

As part of this change we have also given control to the "master user" to grant access to any web address to any Sitemorse account holder in their organisation.

To grant access to audits to a new user, first click on the URL of the site on the Web addresses page to get to the "View audits for a Web address" page.

In the left hand column of this new page are lists of those people that have access to the audits and those people that receive emails about completed audits for this Web address.

Instead of 'deleting' old files, consider creating an area (perhaps as even a sub site / sub-domain etc) to house the 'old' PDF's that can no longer be changed. Make it clear that this area contains 'archived' documents that may offer limited capability.

It's a matter of fact that over time the master document used to create a PDF is lost or inaccessible. Thus your ability to carry out corrective action on that document (which may contain valuable content) is at best limited, at worse impossible.

Sitemorse, shouldn't been seen as penalising you for keeping as much information as possible online, but offering you support and the exact detail about matters that are negatively impacting user experience.

Our recent blog article Broken links in old PDF files goes into further detail, including a mechanism to "export" a PDF file to an editor for updating, whilst retaining previous formatting.

Tuesday October 6th 2009: We are now identifying and validating links inside Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files and analysing more PDF files than before.

Identifying these genuine errors for you as part of the enhancements being introduced results in a more in-depth analysis being performed as we spider through the site.

Although this may, in the short term, have a detrimental effect on your scores it is nevertheless a positive move forward in that we will be ensuring that your users' experience on your website will be improved.

Friday 31st July 2009: Handling the different capitalisations of words by the Sitemorse Spelling service has been greatly enhanced.

Custom dictionaries now support a "match case" flag. When set, the Spelling Service only permits words which match the case precisely.

We've also overhauled the "rules" applied when analysing the content of your site, especially regarding capitalisation:

• Any dictionary word with unusual capitalisation (for instance: "friDAY"), or any word in your custom dictionary marked as "match case" must match exactly.
• Lower-case dictionary words may appear as title-case (with an initial capital letter) - for example as a word at the beginning of a sentence.
• Any lower-case or title-case dictionary word may appear in upper-case, for example as a title.
• Hyphenated words not exactly matching any dictionary words are broken apart into separate words and checked using the above rules.

More information is available in our blog article: "Adding words in SpellChecker just got a lot easier"

Adding additional web addresses are very useful when analysing a specific subdirectory or auditing a site whilst still in development.

From your Dashboard, click "Your web addresses", then "Add new web address" at the base of the left hand column.

You will now be prompted to enter a URL to test, such as:

• www.example.com
• www.example.com:1234 - to audit a site whose server is running on a non-standard port
• www.example.com/folder/ - to audit a subdirectory and all of its content. Sitemorse will not test any content above this directory

It is important to note that entering "www.example.com/folder" is the same as "www.example.com" as, in this respect, "/folder" is interpreted to be a file, and not a subdirectory.

URIs of the form "itpc://www.example.com/podcast.xml" are sometimes seen as a shortcut for subscribing to iTunes podcasts.

However, as the "itpc" uri-scheme has not yet been registered with IANA (as described in RFC 4395 "Guidelines and Registration Procedures for New URI Schemes") the URI cannot be guaranteed to work in all browsers.

For this reason "itpc://" URIs fail the Function diagnostic url/fetch/badscheme with the message: "Unknown or unsupported URL scheme 'itpc'"

More information on registered URI schemes:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes.html

Sitemorse clients can supply authentication details for Sitemorse to log into externally accessible Intranets or staff only sites.

We can also provide the IP addresses of our testing servers if you wish to audit an internal resource.

Standards:

• RFC 2965 - HTTP State Management Mechanism
• Netscape "Client Side State - HTTP Cookies" specification

Description:

A web server attempted to set an HTTP "cookie" but its request was invalid. This is usually because an invalid expiry date format was used (the correct format is Wdy, DD-Mon-YYYY HH:MM:SS GMT).

Prior to 15th January 2009 url/fetch/badcookie diagnostic resulted in a Code quality failure, from this date the diagnostic is a Function failure.

Example:

Set-Cookie: CUSTOMER=WILE_E_COYOTE; path=/; expires=Wed, 09 Nov 19 23:12:40 GMT

Thursday 15th January 2009: It's been some considerable time since we last updated the way that scores are calculated. As this affects your ability to compare your site over time and how you stand in any of our surveys that your site might be part of, it is not something we would consider doing on a regular basis.

Reclassification of failures

These items have been changed to the severity of a "Functional" problem (i.e. the system has a low tolerance for these types of problem and they will affect your score)

• "Compromised" (red) email server problems
• Broken "mailto" links
• Pages with no title
• file/html/noframes
• url/fetch/badcookie***

*** url/fetch/badcookie now always counts as a Function problem, but it is not checked on external links, so the issues we encountered with Nedstats, Doubleclick, etc, should be removed

These items have been changed to a lower severity, similar to a "Code Quality" problem (i.e. the system has a higher tolerance for these types of problem and they will have a limited affect on your score)

• "Impaired" (amber) email server problems***
• Pages with no meta "description"
• Other meta-data problems (e.g. longtitle, badmeta, etc)
• "bad character in URL" type problems (e.g. file/url/badpath)

*** the issues we encountered with some email security services such as MessageLabs previously caused scores to be impacted negatively due to the email server configuration on their backup servers being non-standard. The new email service assesses these types of problems as "impaired" rather than "compromised" so the impact on scores will now be negligible.

Performance

We have introduced a new calculation to better represent the actual download speed from a website. The new data shows higher download speeds for most sites.

To take account of this we have increased the speed thresholds in the benchmarks used to calculate the Performance score. Most sites will not see dramatic changes in their Performance scores but when looking at the detail there may be a significant increase in the download speed figure.

Email testing

The new features of the service look at the email server infrastructure behind your email addresses to make sure that they are configured correctly and that the servers will receive emails.

We have come across numerous email server infrastructures that have either been incorrectly defined to DNS or are mis-configured and wont actually receive emails. Email servers can have different roles, e.g. they may be primary servers, secondary servers, load balance servers or fail-over servers. Each would be defined and configured differently.

This adds another layer of sophistication to our audits and ensures that you are confident that your email infrastructure is defined correctly and configured correctly. We'll also report any availability issues or intermittent type problems if they occur during one of your audits.

Site enhancements

The Directory map feature of the Inventory section is now "clickable". By default it loads as a collapsed list of directories, each sub directory can be expanded to display its contents. By making this change we have resolved a problem where sites with a deep directory structure extended off the page.

Based on customer feedback, we have made the font colour on our web site darker, in order to improve readability through greater contrast.