Today is the 6th annual Blue Beanie Day and we join web fans from around the world in wearing blue hats. We first thought that we will all look like Smurfs in the Pingdom HQ today, but Smurfs (at least most of them) have white hats, not blue.

We at Pingdom want to make the web faster and more reliable, and working with web standards can certainly be a key part of accomplishing this. Pingdom wants to be a good web citizens and make sure our sites work and display correctly for as many users as possible.

We believe in making our products as easy as possible to use, but we also believe in offering first-rate support to you, our customer, when you need to ask us something. Today, we’re announcing the latest addition to our frontline support and that is an FAQ.

You share many of your questions with other customers, and we’ve been collecting these for some time now. We’ve sorted through them, prioritized, and written answers. Now, this is all available to you in the FAQ, which you can find at support.pingdom.com. There, you can click your way to an answer or simply type something into the search box. Either way, we’ve loaded up the FAQ with some of the most common questions we receive, and the answers, of course.

We always strive to make our products as easy as possible for our customers to use. That even includes such seemingly mundane things like input of credit card details.

For a short while now we’ve been testing new input functionality and design for credit card payments. One of the new features is that when the customer types in the credit card number, it will automatically switch to the correct type of card.

Check out this video for a bit of the background and a quick demo of what the new design looks like.

We are committed to making the web faster and more reliable, and we really enjoyed attending the W3C web performance workshop a couple of weeks ago, together with representatives from  Akamai, Google, Microsoft, and many others. This was a day packed with information, often very detailed and technical, about all different kinds of aspects of web performance.

There is an official summary of the workshop, including links to the presentations, but we felt we should give you some of the highlights.

The web is getting more complex by the day. Visitors to your websites want to put things in a shopping cart, create accounts and log in, fill in forms, and more. Most of these important activities require a complex sequence of pages and scripts, working together to accomplish the desired outcome.

This means that not only do you want to make sure your website is up, you also want to make sure that important website functionality is working.

Today, we’re announcing a beta program for a new tool we’re developing, which will help you tackle some of this increasing complexity. With the Pingdom Transaction Monitor, we want to enable you, our customers, to monitor such transactions to see that they are doing what they should.

There’s a new supercomputer at the top of the Top 500 list. The new champion is the Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US. It achieves 17.59 Petaflop/s with 560,640 cores, beating the previous number one, the Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which reaches 16.32 Petaflop/s.

Given that there is a new number one, we want to update our article from earlier this year and include the Titan. Let’s see how the new number one supercomputer in the world compares to its predecessors.

Pingdom has been awarded the prize “Gasell” by DI.se for being the company with the fastest financial growth during 2012 in its region of Sweden, the county of Västmanland.

The prize was given out at an awards ceremony at Conventum in Örebro on November 7th, in front of an audience including other finalists. We at Pingdom are very happy to be given such an honor. This is a milestone on the journey that Pingdom is on, to make the web faster and more reliable.

Today we’re participating in W3C’s Workshop on Web Performance at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. We think it’ll be a great opportunity to meet friends and colleagues, talk web performance in general, and RUM (Real User Monitoring) in particular.

Since the Navigation Timing specification lays the groundwork for much of what’s currently being done in RUM, we thought we’d present how we ended up where we are today, and what the current situation looks like.

Raise the curtains: we present the road to RUM.

Pingdom is on the road again. This time we’re heading to the W3C’s Web Performance Working Group workshop taking place this Thursday at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Attending this workshop, we want to make sure that we listen and learn about what’s coming in the future in terms of web performance. In the pipeline for the working group are things that will undoubtedly have a significant impact on our products, as well as our users.

As LinuxCon Europe starts today in Barcelona, we present an infographic about the state of Linux. It has details about distributions, the Linux kernel, the Linux job market, drivers for adoption, and much more.

In addition to taking a look at the state of Linux, we want to give everyone attending LinuxCon Europe a really cool gift: a 1-year FREE Pingdom Business Account.

Read on to find out more about Linux as well as how to claim your FREE Pingdom account.

If you want the fastest Internet connection right now, at least the fastest possible average connection, you should move to Hong Kong. With an average peak connection speed of 49.2 Mbps, Hong Kong is a few megabits per second faster than South Korea in the number two spot. This is all according to Akamai’s State Of The Internet report for Q2 2012.

If you’re going to carve a pumpkin today, you might be looking for some inspiration. To help you out, we’ve collected a range of pumpkins carved with various geeky themes. There’s Windows, Super Mario, Tux, CSS, Twitter, and more.

We did a similar article four years ago, so we thought it was about time we returned to the subject and found some more geeky pumpkins to inspire you for Halloween. Happy Halloween!

A video published on the front page of the newspaper Aftonbladet reached over 146,000 simultaneous visitors less than a minute after it was shot in Ukraine during the Euro 2012 soccer championship. This was made possible by the Swedish company Shootitlive, which is using the latest in web technology to make it possible for news organizations to provide real-time media coverage from events around the world. Today we’re talking to one of its developers, Emil Stenqvist, about what Shootitlive does and how it does it.

Today, millions of users around the world are installing Windows 8, the latest version of the Microsoft operating system. We will also install one or more copies of Windows 8 in the Pingdom office over the course of the day.

But as exciting as some of what’s new in Windows 8 might be, it does have rather big shoes to fill. Its predecessor, Windows 7, is the fastest selling OS ever, and all Windows versions combined account for almost 90% of all desktop web browsing.

What kind of battery life do you demand from your laptop? Would you be fine with a few hours, or do you want a full workday out of one charge, or perhaps even more? This is a question facing many of us, and recently we at Pingdom spent some time thinking about it.

After yesterday’s Internet Discovery Day and WordCamp, we felt ready to really take on Internet Days today. Now on the way back to Pingdom HQ, we’d like to bring you some of the events and impressions from today.

Tomorrow Internet Days kicks off officially but today was full of all kinds of Internet-related activities as a precursor to the main event. Just arriving back to the Pingdom HQ, we thought we’d share with you a bit about the day’s events.

Want to know what Internet users in Sweden do online each day? When most Swedes start using the Internet? What they buy online? Answers to all of that and more can be found in this report, just released by the Internet Infrastructure Foundation in Sweden.

Even though we really love stats and really digging into them, at 69 pages in total, this report is a bit beyond what we would call easily digestible 🙂 So, quite simply, we thought we’d summarize it, highlighting some of the more funny and interesting aspects of the report.

Pingdom is heading to Internet Days in Stockholm for a schedule full of presentations, discussions, debates, and banter about all things related to the Internet. Some of us Pingdom geeks will be hob-knobbing with the over 1,500 participants expected to attend this year.

Chances are most of you reading this have never written a single line of code in Fortran. Chances are also that most of you use systems, perhaps on a daily basis, that somehow were developed with or run on Fortran.

Yesterday, October 15, it was 56 years since the very first manual for Fortran saw the light of day, and we have it available for you to download right here.