We've just moved to new offices in Edinburgh in the rather stunning St Andrew Square. We spent a long time choosing offices since they had to match quite strict sustainability criteria:

• easy access to public transport (the train station is 3 minutes walk, the bus station is the other side of the square, and the new tram system will run through the square)
• accessible to wheelchair and low vision users (quite hard to find in Edinburgh which is full of very old buildings that are hard to make accessible)
• energy efficient with recycling facilities (the office has recycling bins everywhere, with special bins for toner cartridges which go to a recycling charity)
• plenty of space for future expansion

The new offices fit the bill perfectly, with the bonus of a great view across to Edinburgh Castle. The square itself is currently a hive of activity due to the Edinburgh Festival - Krakow Opera did an open air performance there yesterday.

We've just switched this blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution. Blogger was great, but we have more control over the look and feel of the new platform, which means better integration with the rest of the site.

• W3C recommends a maximum of 64 characters for page titles.
• Bing recommends a title between 5 and 65 characters long.
• Yahoo recommends a maximum title length of 67 characters.
• Google don't have any guidance for content publishers, but recommend a maximum title length of approximately 60 characters for Google's own pages.

• Bing - titles up to 67 characters are displayed, with longer titles truncated to whole words around 53 characters (so going over the limit on Bing greatly shortens the title displayed in the search results)
• Yahoo - titles up to 65 characters are displayed, longer titles are truncated to whole words under 65 characters
• Google - titles up to 71 characters displayed, longer titles are truncated to whole words, with the following exceptions:
  
  • Results included from Google patent search - patent title is limited to 71 characters but "Google Patent Search" is added to the end of the 71 character title.
  • The title limit used to be 66 characters, and some old documents remain in the index with titles still truncated at 66 characters

Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.

We've just launched PowerMapper 5.0, which will be available to all customers with a support and maintenance contract before the end of the month.

New features in this release include:

• Two new map styles
• Import data from Google analytics or webmaster tools
• Overlay imported data onto site maps (little graphs are drawn next to page thumbnails)
• Add design notes to maps (use this when using the site map as a blueprint for site re-development)
• Extract links from Flash sites
• Resizable page thumbnails
• Support for non-European character sets including Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean
• User interface improvements including customizable toolbars and new map wizard
• Exporting meta data
• Support for Windows 7

We'll talk about the new features in more detail in follow-up posts.

Part of the our sales strategy for 2009 is expanding our reseller program. In January we signed up Dell, Compucom and QBS Software.

We're always on the lookout for new resellers, and offer generous discounts for volume sales.

As part of the online demo at try.electrumsolutions.com we collect summary statistics about pages scanned by our service.

One interesting statistic covers versions of HTML and XHTML in common use:

• HTML 4.01 DOCTYPEs account for about 20% of pages scanned
• XHTML 1.0 DOCTYPEs account for about 50% of pages scanned
• XHTML 1.1 DOCTYPEs account for about 1% of pages scanned
• About 20% of pages scanned have no DOCTYPE

HTML vs. XHTML Version Statistics

Last week we released SortSite 3.1. The main theme of this release was expanded browser compatibility rules.

We now have a lot more checks for incompatible CSS, HTML and JavaScript - as well as adding support for Google Chrome. We've reorganized the compatibility summary so you can now see at a glance which browsers a site works in.

Other features in this release include: page weight checks; new accessibility summary; and greatly reduced memory consumption on large sites (up to 75% less memory in some cases).

On Dec 11th 2008 the W3C released the long awaited WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. The first draft was published in Jan 2001, so they've been 8 years in the making. For comparison, it took NASA 8.5 years from Kennedy's 1961 speech to land a man on the moon.

On Dec 16th 2008 Electrum released SortSite 3.0, the first commercial accessibility tool to support the final W3C WCAG2 recommendation.

In addition to support for WCAG2 there's been a host of user interface improvements, including the ability to set a corporate web site quality policy and share that with co-workers.

We shipped the SortSite 2.07 maintenance release earlier this month.

Changes include a new scheduler, improved performance (up to 10x faster on some sites) and fixes for a number of false positives reported by users.

Fortunately false positives are pretty rare - we only see 3 or 4 reports a month. Any user can report a problem using the Report Broken Rule menu option - we log these and endeavor to fix them in the next maintenance release (although anything reported in the week before a release is usually deferred to the next release).