GrayBit Turns Thirty
Read Important GrayBit Update!
GrayBit, the online contrast accessibility testing tool I mentioned and described in a previous post, is now thirty days old. Happy Birthday to GrayBit. So, what happened over the course of its so far short life? Let’s see…
Beta Testing
Testing of the v.05 Beta has gone well and the testing was vigorous. Often times there were more than twenty users on the site at the same time. During one peak moment with over 50 users online, we were logging over 30 conversions-per-minute. I was wow’d (I thought we had a bug until I realized how many people were online). Being linked from Zeldman.com really helped drive the needed testers our way (thank you Jeffrey Zeldman).
At the time of this entry, barring advertising stats, we experienced the following over this tool’s first thirty days:
- Total Page Views: 39,194
- Total Conversions: 14,963
- Total Unique Users: 6,868
What’s Next?
We’re actually a week or two from the completion on version 1.0. After all, we can’t stay in Beta forever. Everything identified thus far has been addressed (if it could be addressed), Jona’s still trying to work out the GIF transparency issue and I have to do a couple more site tweaks and then we’re done.
If you’re interested, please check back, (or subscribe to my feed) as I will be announcing the version 1.0 launch right here as soon as it happens. We’ll ask that you come back to test it again to help us verify all’s in proper working order.
Jonathan Fenocchi responds:
Posted: April 9th, 2006 at 12:24 am →
Sweet, man. Totally wicked-sweet.
Martin Neczypor responds:
Posted: April 10th, 2006 at 3:00 pm →
Congrats guys, you deserve it. Graybit is an amazing application!
JayM responds:
Posted: April 13th, 2006 at 12:21 pm →
Congrats, and happy bday to Graybit
(I never knew “application-years” are 30 days 
). I remember testing it when it was first out and it was extremely slow. I can tell now that you guys have made some significant changes. If only the ASP community would put out all these wonderful applications :*(.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: April 15th, 2006 at 12:01 am →
Thanks
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: April 16th, 2006 at 7:00 pm →
Well, in a lit bit more than a month… We have released GrayBit v1.0. Check it out, Jona already wrote about it in his blog. Awesome job, Jona! Yay to me too I guess. And, since I’m on a roll here, special thanks to Bokehman too for helping sort out *.png and *.gif. transparency issues.
Everything that was brought up by people was addressed, fixed, changed, made better, tweaked, etc. The only thing I didn’t change was the style sheet. One person complained about the white text on a black background (I made it big text though). In response I made a black on white CSS and asked people to check it out thinking I might change the default. I polled a lot of people and everyone said they liked the black over the white best by far. Me too, actually. So, to not discount this other person or those like him, I added a PHP style changer to the site (uses a cookie, but needs no client-side scripting). Now those who care not for the dark theme can use a light one. I ask that they click a link on the footer one-time.
Martin Neczypor responds:
Posted: April 16th, 2006 at 7:13 pm →
Well done, I think it’s wonderful that even though just one person complained about the color that you created an alternate style. GrayBit is excellent, congrats to both of you for your excellent work/achievement with creating such an excellent service.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: April 17th, 2006 at 7:39 am →
Thanks Martin
Sean Fraser responds:
Posted: May 5th, 2006 at 12:29 pm →
It simplifies my life. I’ve been using Photoshop/Channel Mixer/Monochrome for testing screenshots of sites but GrayBit allows for real-time testing of links. Thank you.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: May 5th, 2006 at 2:13 pm →
You’re welcome Sean! Imagine my surprise today to see a real, non-comment-spam, post. Thank you!