We’ve picked up a new toy at the office recently: the LG 360 Cam. It allows you to take those cool 360 degree photos you can swivel around with using your phone’s gyroscope or a pair of “VR” goggles you stick your phone into.

This review on CNET covers just about everything you need to know:

The LG 360 Cam is an easy-to-use and comparatively inexpensive 360-degree point-and-shoot camera. It’s compact and its clever case doubles as a handgrip. Its mobile app lets you preview and review your shots as well as control the camera. You can shoot with just one lens at a time for non-360-degree images.

For most people, the only way to take these kinds of photos is to whip out your phone, install an app, and slowly stitch together multiple photos into one big one (with a little algorithm magic) in the hopes it all comes together. Not so with this LG, which features a stupidly simple solution to the issue—it stuck two very wiiiiiiiiiiide cameras on each side, put a button on the front, and called it a day. This no frills approach is extremely successful, there are few things to screw up—you shoot once (or twice for safety!) and you’re done. You can control the camera with an app on your phone, so you can leave the room before you shoot your photo.

We think the best part about this is the price. On a good day you can pick one of these up for less than $100. Photography is a notoriously expensive hobby, but this isn’t an example of that.

So why are we talking about this on a site about the web?

Well, there’s a reason! We were approached by someone recently to shoot photos for their house which they intend to sell on their own. It seemed like a great opportunity to break out the new camera and embed some 360 photos in the ad.

Combine this with some Google Cardboard or one of those plastic headsets, and you almost don’t even need an open house. Almost.

Disclaimer: No one paid us to say any of this, we just enjoy geeking out about cameras every once in a while. The links in the article are affiliated, however. So if you decide to buy, you’d be doing us a solid.

How quickly your web page loads is important. Actually, a site which loads quickly could be the most important thing in deciding whether or not a customer decides to buy. From Google (“Why Marketers Should Care About Mobile Page Speed“):

Consider this: Mobile sites lag behind desktop sites in key engagement metrics such as average time on site, pages per visit, and bounce rate. For retailers, this can be especially costly since 30% of all online shopping purchases now happen on mobile phones. The average U.S. retail mobile site loaded in 6.9 seconds in July 2016, but, according to the most recent data, 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again.

You could have invested in a great looking responsive layout for your site, but if the thing takes 10 seconds to load, people are already back on the search engine looking for something else.

It is understandable, then, that we have a lot of people who come to us concerned about how quickly (or not) their site is loading. Some will point out how slowly it loads on their machine. Some will show us scores generated from Google’s own “PageSpeed Tool,” which issues a score out of 100 on a variety of factors, the idea being that we can make that number higher as proof that the site is quicker.

A couple things with this:

• Performance on your computer/phone/potato on your internet connection will not be a great indicator of site performance for other people. A old computer and/or slower internet connection could give you a false impression compared to those closer to an average speed. It’s better to use a third-party tool which will likely give you much more stable data to work with.
• Google’s a smart group of folks, no doubt about it, but their PageSpeed tool leaves something to be desired. This article from GlückPress, “F*** Pagespeed” proves it’s possible to have a lightning-fast website completely loaded in half a second which also scores poorly on Google’s tool.

The above article gives a pretty good list of guidelines for judging if your site is loading quick enough. Here’s the skinny:

• Go to Pingdom Tools.
• Enter the URL of your front page.
• Pick—this is important!—a location nearest to your most likely audience for “Test from”.
• Run the test.
  Then run it again, from the same location.
  And again.
• Look at the load time.
  Don’t look at the “Performance grade”, it’s generated via PageSpeed’s API, screw it.
  Look at load time only for now.

Easy right? We went ahead and ran a couple of our sites through:

PageSpeed Score

How Fast it Really Is

Great. We’re under the dreaded 3 second mark Google warned us about. With a bit of wiggle room even. Our new website for The Next Wave even comes close to getting under a second—it occasionally does when the test is repeated.

‘My site is slow even with this, what can I do to speed it up?’

A truly quick site that will stay quick is one which is designed from the beginning to be quick. This means it utilizes few images (this is also very helpful for responsiveness!). It minimizes the amount of scripts and plugins it needs (beware of premium themes which require a lot of plugins to function like it does in the demo). The Next Wave’s site, for instance, gets most of its visual flair from CSS and a single JavaScript file.

Some sites are image-heavy, however. Websitetology currently uses quite a few images in its design, so we’ve used a few tools to reduce the loadtimes, which I’ll outline below:

WP Super Cache (Free)

Caching is one of the two biggest things you can do to speed things up. We currently leverage WP Super Cache (find it in your “add new plugin” area in the dashboard) to take our dynamically generated pages and turn them into straight HTML. This means when someone visits the site, the server doesn’t need to grab information from the database every time to load, it simply grabs a saved completed version of the page.

CloudFlare CDN (Free w/ paid upgrades)

You could probably write an entire book about the benefits CloudFlare provides for a website host. It saves parts of your website (or if you’re clever, the entire thing) to its servers around the world, speeding things up considerably. It protects your website from hackers and cyberattacks. They can even give you a free SSL certificate for HTTPS browsing. It can be a little tricky to set up since you’ll need to change your domain to point to CloudFlare, and then back to your server, but if you aren’t already on CloudFlare or something like it, stop reading this and do it now.

WP Smush (Free w/ paid premium version)

This is the other big thing for making your site as fast as it can be. You’ve gotta get your image sizes down. For the most part I try to keep embedded images below 100kb, and limit images above 100kb to only 1 or 2 per page, if that. Sometimes you can achieve these file sizes without changing much to the image itself. WP Smush from the folks at WPMU DEV will automatically compress your images down with no visible decrease in image quality. The premium version supports further features like converting PNGs to JPEGs (a huge improvement if you aren’t using transparency in your images) and a “super smush” which does a second compression pass with a barely-if-at-all noticeable decrease in image quality. The premium version is definitely worth it.

CSS and Script Minification with Hummingbird (Premium plugin only)

Okay, things are getting a little deep here, we understand, but if you’re still struggling with site loads you may need to go down this rabbit hole. Hummingbird is another plugin from WPMU DEV which, well, takes care of all the loose threads related to site load speed. Most notably it “minifies” your CSS and Javascript files. The easiest way to explain it is this: it combines all those little files into one or a few and removes all the unnecessary spaces and line breaks in the code. That means it isn’t very easy for a person to read the code, but as this great scene in Silicon Valley puts it best: the machine reads it all the same anyways.

Still slow? Don’t throw your computer, we can walk you through it. Check out our monthly seminar.

The communication divide between users of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, and Google’s range of Android devices, is shrinking. Google’s recent release of two new apps — Duo, a video chatting app, and Allo, a cross-platform messaging app — both support Apple’s iOS. This stands in contrast to Apple’s Facetime and Messages apps, which are only supported on iOS devices, effectively segregating them from the Android world.

Duo: Google’s answer to Facetime

The new video chat app, officially released August 16, highlights itself with one unique feature, called Knock Knock, which displays a live preview before a call is accepted. Although Duo is available to users of Apple’s iOS devices, the Knock Knock feature is currently only supported on Android. Google wrote in their official blog that the feature makes video calling seem more welcoming, as opposed to an interruption.

Other features sported by Duo include the ability to use phone numbers as contacts for video calls, end-to-end encryption of calls, automatic switching between the use of WiFi and mobile data for video streams, and the use of low-bandwidth optimization, which allows for the quality of the video stream to be adjusted based on network activity, and prevents calls from dropping. Duo does, however, currently lack the ability to make conference-style calls to multiple recipients at once — features supported by Apple’s Facetime and Microsoft’s Skype apps.

Allo: The cross-platform hybrid messaging app

Google’s brand new instant messaging app, released on September 21, boasts perhaps the most extensive list of features of any messaging app to date. One feature which helps bridge the communication gap is the ability for messages sent in Allo to be automatically converted to SMS, free of charge, and delivered to users who don’t have Allo installed on their device. This allows Allo users to use it as their preferred messaging app even if their recipient doesn’t wish to install the app on their device.

Taking advantage of Google’s innovative artificial intelligence technology, Allo includes a feature called Smart Reply, which uses predictive analytics to study how you send messages and makes suggestions that attempt to emulate your style of reply, which can be sent with a single button press. This feature is further enabled by personal assistant features, which work in a similar way to Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.

Replies generated by Smart Reply can include animated stickers, similar to Facebook Messenger’s. Other style-related features include “Whisper Shout,” which allows users to increase or decrease the size of messages in an effort to signify volume, and the ability for users to draw on pictures before they are sent.

Allo’s Incognito mode and optional encryption

Taking a cue from the popular Snapchat app, Allo allows users to enter “Incognito mode,” a carryover from Google’s Chrome browser, which sends messages that are off the record, auto-destructing from both Google’s server after delivery, and the recipient’s device shortly after viewing. Messages sent in Incognito mode make use of end-to-end encryption.

The Allo app has been criticized by privacy advocates and security experts for not applying end-to-end encryption by default to messages not sent in Incognito mode. While this encryption can be enabled to cover all messages, some say the decision to have it disabled by default can still lead to scenarios where privacy and security are violated. Critics include famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who criticized the app on Twitter, referring to the app without encryption enabled as “Google Surveillance,” in part because of US foreign intelligence courts’ refusal to deny any surveillance requests.

Thinking about #Allo? Last year, our secret court approved 100% of requests for surveillance. They would cover Allo. https://t.co/oYtc3Pu8tx

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 21, 2016