Setting Up My Own URL Shortening Service

Posted on by Rob Larsen

As I recently mentioned (on Twitter, does that really count?), I’m not a fan of URL shortening services. I don’t like the idea of trusting the value of links pointing to my sites to a third party. Especially since the URL shortening space itself is so sketchy. With that in mind, it was with interest that I read about the “shortlink” relation. It’s basically a scheme set up to instruct browsers and applications on the proper “short” URL to use for a document. There’s actually a competing, but similar “shorturl” specification floating around out there as well.

Whichever one wins, I approve of the concept. I want to own my own short URLs. I don’t want any Digg bars framing my site, or sneaky, link-juice stealing redirection schemes.
Continue reading “Setting Up My Own URL Shortening Service” →

How Difficult Is It To Avoid Expensive CSS Selectors?

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I’ve read all the articles and I’m still compelled to write rules like this one I wrote earlier tonight:

#main-menu .primary a{
	color:#7b0000;
}

I know I’m not alone in using rules like that. It’s a super common pattern.
Continue reading “How Difficult Is It To Avoid Expensive CSS Selectors?” →

Even Faster Web Sites (Review)

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I finally finished reading Even Faster Web Sites. It’s good, but in terms of things for my day to day, it’s kind of a mixed bag. In some ways (specifically in the areas of JavaScript efficiency, image compression and CSS selectors) it’s more practical than High Performance Web Sites and in others I had a hard time coming up with a concrete example that I’d actually run across that would be served by the topic at hand.

With that in mind, looking at the table of contents I found the bolded chapters most interesting for my day-to-day coding (your mileage may vary, of course)

Chapter 1. Understanding Ajax Performance
Chapter 2. Creating Responsive Web Applications
Chapter 3. Splitting the Initial Payload
Chapter 4. Loading Scripts Without Blocking
Chapter 5. Coupling Asynchronous Scripts
Chapter 6. Positioning Inline Scripts
Chapter 7. Writing Efficient JavaScript
Chapter 8. Scaling with Comet
Chapter 9. Going Beyond Gzipping
Chapter 10. Optimizing Images
Chapter 11. Sharding Dominant Domains
Chapter 12. Flushing the Document Early
Chapter 13. Using Iframes Sparingly
Chapter 14. Simplifying CSS Selectors
Appendix A. Performance Tools

Which isn’t to say that the other chapters weren’t interesting. They were, I just don’t need to deal with some of the issues solved by those techniques very often in my day job. That was especially true of the the Comet chapter and many of the issues related to managing multiple script files and/or large blocks of JS code.

Some comments on the chapters I found most interesting:
Continue reading “Even Faster Web Sites (Review)” →

Webinar: Increase the Performance of Your Website With Amazon CloudFront

Posted on by Rob Larsen

This may be of interest to some of you:

In this webinar, you will learn how Amazon CloudFront can improve the performance of your website and cost you less than a traditional content delivery service (CDN). Amazon CloudFront is an easy to use, high performance content delivery service that lets you quickly and cost-effectively deliver website content to your users using a global network of edge locations in the United States, Europe and Asia.

You will learn how Amazon CloudFront is different from most traditional CDNs and how easy it is to get started.

Increase the Performance of Your Website With Amazon CloudFront

I use CloudFront at both home and work and love it. It’s cheap and performs as advertised. Low-latency, high transfer speeds, rock solid uptime (pingdom has yet to report a problem in nine months) and utilizing edge locations is an obvious benefit (especially to the healthy percentage of visitors my personal site has in Europe.) So, if you’re at all interested maybe the above will be just the thing to get you started.

Why bothers? Well, for performance geeks it’s the easiest way to clear Yahoo’s performance rule #2. Don’t you want to be a cool performance geek?

While Twitter is Down…

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I thought I’d (gently) toss some links at you:

  • I read an Introduction to sessionStorage a couple of weeks ago. I approve.

    As it stands, I’m always storing bits of data in globally accessible places (either in the DOM or in a namespaced Data object,) and I always have to document what I’m doing so having a standard place to park data is great.

    The fact that it stretches across an entire session? I love it. Especially since it’s so straightforward when compared with cookies. I hate dealing with cookies. It feels like coding through a time machine. sessionStorage is much more modern. Convenience FTW.

  • Of less interest to me on a practical level was Computing with JavaScript Web Workers. It’s cool, but for the stuff I do? Not immediately useful.

    Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ll get some computationally expensive problem and will end up using them next week or something.

  • JavaScript is represented strongly on the 30 Most Influential People In Programming list. Care to guess at the JS names included?
  • Interested in the ongoing discussion of web fonts (the embeddable, fancy kind?) one of my co-workers, Colin Henson is working on a great series outlining the whole shebang. check out: Web Fonts part 1 and Web Fonts part 2.

    We worked together on the redesign of CramerOnline.com where we used Cufon for headers, so it’s very topical around the office.

    Quick verdict on Cufon, btw? Slightly tricky, but definitely ready for prime time 🙂

  • While I appreciate all the grassroots efforts to rid the web of Internet Explorer 6, the real way we rid ourselves of that beast lies not with us, as developers, but with IT departments where they control every piece of software on their users machines.

    It’s with that in mind that the good press Windows 7 is getting should be greeted with great joy by web developers the world over. While many IT departments skipped over upgrading to Vista (I know of what I speak, we use XP at work), the lure of Windows 7 might be too much for them to ignore.

    Which would mean IE8 would get a big bump.

    And I would dance a little jig.