When was the last time that you used a web directory in order to find a site? In fact, when was the last time that you used a web directory for anything? The last time that I even looked at a directory was after Website Grader noted that this website did not appear in DMOZ or Yahoo's directory. Other than that, I probably haven't used a directory to find information in over a decade. My first instinct is to use Google, and just try different keywords until I find what I'm looking for.

I stumbled upon an interesting and potentially useful website grading service today. Website Grader examines the homepage of a website, and brings together data from multiple sources in order to give an idea of how effective the marketing effectiveness of that website. More importantly, it provides tips on how to improve. For example, this website is not listed on DMOZ and Yahoo Directories, something that could be done in order to improve ranking.

This morning I received an email telling me that the template downloads in one of my OpenGL/MiniGL templates was no longer working. This surprised me since they had worked previously. What was even more perplexing was that the files were exactly in the right place; the download link pointed to the file. Stranger still, image files in the same directory could be downloaded and viewed without a problem.

The original set of OpenGL/MiniGL templates published on this site, were for using GLUT. GLUT is a cross-platform toolkit that provides a consistent method for opening OpenGL windows, and handling events from keyboards, mice, and other input devices. The Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is another toolkit that could be used for the same purpose. One of the advantages of SDL is that it is a more modern Application Programming Interface (API), and also includes an API for audio. It's joystick/controller support is also more extensive. Therefore, a set of SDL tutorials have been added to the OpenGL/MiniGL templates section.

This month has seen a move to a newer, faster server. Just to give an idea of how much difference this makes, Google's search-bot took an average of 2.2 seconds to download a page on the old server, whereas a page download now takes about 0.5 seconds. That's approximately 4 times faster.