Archives
SpriteMe (part 3)
This is the third of three blog posts about SpriteMe. The first post, SpriteMe makes spriting easy, reviews SpriteMe’s features with a summary of the performance savings across the Alexa U.S. top 100 web sites. The second post, SpriteMe (part 2), talks about my experience at WordCamp that motivated SpriteMe and the logic behind how […]
SpriteMe (part 2)
This is the second of three blog posts about SpriteMe. The first post, SpriteMe makes spriting easy, reviews SpriteMe’s features with a summary of the performance savings across the Alexa U.S. top 100 web sites. This post talks about my experience at WordCamp that motivated SpriteMe and the logic behind how SpriteMe makes its recommendations […]
SpriteMe makes spriting easy
I’m excited to announce SpriteMe – a tool that makes it easy to create CSS sprites. It’s a bookmarklet, so it runs in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Just drag&drop this link to your bookmarks toolbar or right-click to add it to your favorites: SpriteMe. A CSS sprite combines multiple background images into a […]
Browserscope: how does your browser compare?
A year ago this week, I launched UA Profiler – a framework for measuring browser performance. Today, Browserscope takes browser profiling to the next level. Browserscope is a full blown open source project, headed up by Lindsey Simon (see his blog post). The framework has been expanded to contain multiple test categories: Network – These […]
jQuery Conference and The Ajax Experience
I’m heading out on the red-eye tonight for Boston. I’ll be there for three action-packed days! Sunday morning I’m speaking at jQuery Conference ’09. Monday afternoon I’m doing a talk at The Ajax Experience. Both conferences look great. I’m excited to share what I know and talk with other web developers to find out their […]
Even Faster Web Sites in Skiathos
Ioannis Cherouvim, a software engineer from Greece, sent me this photo: He took Even Faster Web Sites with him on his vacation to Skiathos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. In his email, Ioannis mentioned that applying the tips from my previous book to the newspaper web site Eleftherotypia (“free press” in Greek) saved […]
Doloto: JavaScript download optimizer
One of the speakers at Velocity 2008 was Ben Livshits from Microsoft Research. He spoke about Doloto, a system for splitting up huge JavaScript payloads for better performance. I talk about Doloto in Even Faster Web Sites. When I wrote the book, Doloto was an internal project, but that all changed last week when Microsoft […]
The skinny on cookies
I just finished Eric Lawrence’s post on Internet Explorer Cookie Internals. Eric works on the IE team as well as owning Fiddler. Everything he writes is worth reading. In this article he answers FAQs about how IE handles cookies, for example: If I don’t specify a leading dot when setting the DOMAIN attribute, IE doesn’t […]
OSCON and Page Responsiveness videos
I had a great time at OSCON a few weeks back. It was in San Jose this year. (Pro: I don’t have to travel and my wife can go to the parties. Con: I miss Portland.) Just as I wrote about last year, Gregg Pollack was there asking speakers to summarize their talks in 30 […]
F5 and XHR deep dive
In Ajax Caching: Two Important Facts from the HttpWatch blog, the author points out that: …any Ajax derived content in IE is never updated before its expiration date – even if you use a forced refresh (Ctrl+F5). The only way to ensure you get an update is to manually remove the content from the cache. […]
OmniTI and performance koolaid
In YSlow! to YFast! in 45 minutes, Theo Schlossnagle (CEO of OmniTI) delivers a play-by-play about how he made his corporate web site 35% faster. The amazing revelation in his commentary is that he was able to complete all of these improvements while sitting in my workshop at Velocity (ahem). OmniTI is a full service […]
Wikia: fast pages retain users
At OSCON last week, I attended Artur Bergman’s session about Varnish – A State of the Art High-Performance Reverse Proxy. Artur is the VP of Engineering and Operations at Wikia. He has been singing the praises of Varnish for awhile. It was great to see his experiences and resulting advice in one presentation. But what […]
back in the saddle: EFWS! Velocity!
The last few months are a blur for me. I get through stages of life like this and look back and wonder how I ever made it through alive (and why I ever set myself up for such stress). The big activities that dominated my time were Even Faster Web Sites and Velocity. Even Faster […]
Firefox 3.5 at the top
The web world is abuzz today with the release of Firefox 3.5. On the launch page, Mozilla touts the results of running SunSpider. Over on UA Profiler, I’ve developed a different set of tests that count the number of critical performance features browsers do, or don’t, have. Currently, there are 11 traits that are measured. […]
Velocity: Tim O’Reilly and 20% discount
It was great to read Tim O’Reilly’s blog post about Velocity. He tells the story about the first meeting where we talked about starting a conference for the web performance and operations community. It almost didn’t happen! The first meeting got postponed. This was at OSCON, and Tim got tied up preparing his keynote. Luckily, […]
Simplifying CSS Selectors
This post is based on a chapter from Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS […]
Velocity – fully programmed
With my book and Velocity hitting in the same month, I’ve been slammed. Even though we started the Velocity planning process eleven months ago, we’ve been tweaking the program schedule up to the last minute, making room for new products and technology breakthroughs. I’m happy to say that the slate of speakers is nailed down, […]
Using Iframes Sparingly
This post is based on a chapter from Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS […]
Stanford videos available
Last fall I taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford. My class was videotaped so people enrolled through the Stanford Center for Professional Development could watch at offhours. In an earlier blog post I mentioned that SCPD was working to make the videos available. I’m pleased to announce that you can now watch these […]
Flushing the Document Early
This post is based on a chapter from Even Faster Web Sites, the follow-up to High Performance Web Sites. Posts in this series include: chapters and contributing authors, Splitting the Initial Payload, Loading Scripts Without Blocking, Coupling Asynchronous Scripts, Positioning Inline Scripts, Sharding Dominant Domains, Flushing the Document Early, Using Iframes Sparingly, and Simplifying CSS […]