I surfed on to the Alexa website today, only to find a neat surprise. They have changed the look of the traffic details page a little, now with rounded corners and all the Web 2.0-ish look. The traffic ranking graph now also uses AJAX, so it behaves really Web 2.0-ish (i.e. screen updates without reloading the page)

Did Alexa previously allow you to compare up to 5 sites? I remember seeing the “compare this to” textbox, but I remember seeing only one textbox there. Anyway, now they allow you to compare up to 5 different domains.

Alexa Traffic Details Comparison

Apart from that, I have also noticed that they have a permalink feature, so people can just link in. For example, this link goes direct to display a comparison of Google, Yahoo, MSN, MySpace, and Baidu.

There is also a “smoothing” bar where you can drag to smoothen the graph, making it easier to see an overall picture. So for example you could push the bar all the way to the left and see something like this:

Smooth Graph

Or all the way to the right, to see a smoother graph:

Smooth Graph

I think its nice!

Sites are all now moving towards Web 2.0 style. I think I should too! Let me jot it down on my to-do list – I’ll work on my AJAX commenting feature first (like the one on Blog-Republic – I think its really cool!) :) I came across this short AJAX tutorial on W3Schools. Mozilla also has its own getting started guide to AJAX. Could be a good start.

So many things to learn!