Jdrop – JSON in the cloud
I’m excited to announce the release of Jdrop – a JSON repository in the cloud.
The motivation for Jdrop came from my recent focus on mobile and subsequent launch of bookmarklets for mobile devices (Mobile Perf and Page Resources, followed by Docsource). I like using bookmarklets because they run on all mobile browsers that support JavaScript. Finally – some visibility into mobile performance!
My enthusiasm ebbed once I started using these bookmarklets, however. The information gathered and displayed by these bookmarklets overwhelms the tiny screens on mobile devices. I’m adamant about gathering performance data on actual mobile devices. I don’t want to use emulators or UA switching from my desktop – these techniques introduce bias in the analysis (differences in cache size, connection limits, etc.). Also, they overlook the impact of mobile carrier networks.
I realized what I wanted to do was gather the data on the mobile device, but analyze that data remotely.
Bookmarklets basically perform those two steps: gather data and display data. It was pretty simple to insert a step to save the data to Jdrop. Once the data is in the cloud, it can be accessed from anywhere especially desktops with more screen real estate. The bookmarklet’s display code is easily re-used by wrapping the data in JSON and passing it back to the display code inside Jdrop’s web page. That, in a nutshell, is Jdrop.
I integrated Jdrop with my two bookmarklets: Page Resources and Docsource. And I’m ecstatic to announce that Thomas Fuchs added Jdrop to his DOM Monster bookmarklet. When you run these bookmarklets you see a new “save to Jdrop” link.
All of these bookmarklets, plus others, are in the uber Mobile Perf bookmarklet. The full set of steps are as follows:
On your mobile device:
- sign in to Jdrop
- install the Mobile Perf bookmarklet
- run Page Resources, Docsource, or DOM Monster and click “save to Jdrop”
On your desktop or laptop:
- sign in to Jdrop
- click on “My JSON” to view the data you saved
If you have or want to build a bookmarklet focused on mobile performance, I encourage you to integrate it with Jdrop. The Jdrop devdocs explain the necessary changes.
Jdrop is in alpha mode. You’ll likely find bugs or think of new features – if so please add them to the list of issues. Jdrop is open source so you can see all the code. A huge shout out to James Pearce who wrote a ton of code including oauth-php and almost all of the UI.
I gave a sneak peek of Jdrop at my workshop today at Webstock. Along with Jdrop I also demoed the new Blaze Mobile Performance Tool and pcapperf. We’ve got the beginnings of a mobile performance toolkit. I’m starting to gather more data (on my mobile devices) and analyzing that data (on my desktop) thanks to Jdrop and these other tools. I look forward to working with the mobile dev community to create more tools and use those to make a faster mobile web.
Blaze.io launches WPT with mobile devices
About 30 minutes ago Blaze.io launched the Blaze Mobile Performance Tool. This is incredibly exciting. I’ve only played with it a little bit but I wanted to blog about it ASAP to make people aware. Note that the service might get overrun today and tomorrow – so be patient and come back later if you have to.
Everyone reading this hopefully knows about WebPagetest. I consider WebPagetest to be one of the most important performance tools released – ever. Pat Meenan has done an amazing amount of work on it. The reason I think it’s so important is it dramatically lowers the bar for doing performance analysis. You don’t need to install a plugin or exe – all you need is a browser. It’s no coincidence that over a dozen companies including Aptimize, Strangeloop Networks, and Catchpoint have volunteered to host instances of WebPagetest in locations across the globe. Being able to get an HTTP waterfall chart, a Page Speed report, connection info, and screenshots all from one tool is powerful.
Building on the WebPagetest framework, the folks at Blaze.io cracked open some iPhones and Androids and hooked them up. This is a first version so not every feature is available, and my Android tests showed a few quirks that need to be investigated, but this is a great first step.
As shown in the screenshot above, you can see a picture of the site you tested and play a video of that site loading. Clicking on the waterfall chart shows a large version. Right now this doesn’t have a detailed breakdown (DNS, connect, wait, download, etc.). The test I did using their Android device had some resources showing a “1 ms” download time – obviously an issue to investigate. The page size seems larger than expected – I’m assuming this is uncompressed size versus the actual bytes transferred.
I’m sure they have a long todo list. I’d like to see integration with Page Speed. They have a link to view the HAR file. The provided link goes directly to Honza‘s online HAR Viewer. With a little wrangling I was able to download the HAR file to disk and upload it to my HAR to Page Speed tool to get a Page Speed report. More devices would be a huge win.
I’m doing a workshop next week at Webstock on mobile performance tools. I’m so psyched to have another one to show off. Great work Blaze.io!
Site redesign
The list of things I’m good at does not include web design. As a result, this was how my website looked for the past few years:
Over the holidays I was lucky enough to get connected with Emily Matthews from NOLA Marketing who came up with a new design for stevesouders.com:
Around the same time I met Jennifer Stuart who develops, among other things, WordPress themes. She took the design and developed a custom theme for my blog from which I lifted parts to integrate back into the main site.
Shout outs to Emily and Jennifer – thanks for making my site look so much better!