I’ve been looking very hard recently at jQuery as it seems to provide such a useful lightweight toolkit. My background is Microsoft .net and I have been using the ASP.NET AJAX framework but jQuery has been on my radar because the buzz online about it is huge and it just seems to do some great stuff so easily that would fit in well with the AJAX features.

Well looks like Microsoft (and Nokia) have been keeping a close eye too as they’ve announced they’re going to make jQuery part of the official development platform. Excellent news and I’ll certainly be using jQuery in the very near future.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but a certain screaming baby has been occupying a lot of my time.

 A few weeks ago it was Google’s 10th birthday and they’ve made available the oldest index they still have so take a trip back in time to January 2001. It’s really interesting to see the results for some search terms - iPod doesn’t relate to anything Apple at all!

1,326,920,000 pages? Not a lot on current standards is it?

No matter how much I think Google’s domination of online markets is dangerous I still have to say they impress me again and again.

Google Analytics which must be one of the most adopted web analytics packages by now is now available on Google Code. So now you can extend Google Analytics as you need meaning you can have a custom installation for each website if needed.

I got a new mobile phone back in August which means I’ve at last got a quick enough mobile connection to surf on the move. It’s a Sony Ericsson W890i which packages up everything I need: a mobile, a half way decent camera, an MP3 player and mobile Internet.

Mobile web is reaching a proportion of the population that just can’t be ignored - the iPhone has reached 0.30% of global web traffic which might sound like not a great deal but as a new medium it’s a massive increase. You’ve also got to remember the different use of web browsers on a mobile phone - behaviour is very different to when using a browser on a computer.

I’ve found the w890i to be very good for the mobile web and recommend Opera Mini as an excellent mobile browser. It just means I can access information quicker but I only tend to skim information rather than doing more in depth searching / reading. This shows why even if the mobile browsers can render standard websites you should consider a separate mobile website.

Mobile websites should be really cut back to exactly what people will want on the move. Forget pages of text explaining your service just give them the ability to search quickly and get the information they want. For a lot of companies a location search and location details is going to the core of a website. Think out of box a bit here - you might even have features that just wouldn’t work on the standard website - how about a hand reference guide?

So start thinking mobile - even the glacial-paced W3C have a best practices document.