Why Front End Performance Matters to Everyone, Not Just the High Traffic Giants

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Yeah, Even to You. 🙂

I suspect it’s because the people that are most vocal about the subject are from places like Google and Yahoo!, but it seems to me that a lot of people think that front end performance really only matters for extremely high traffic sites. When talking about these kind of things with other engineers at conferences and the like I’ve heard something similar to the following a few times and it left me scratching my head:

“That stuff is for the Googles of the world. We don’t really need to focus on that with what we do.”

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Two Easy Ways to Get Set Up With Amazon’s CloudFront

Posted on by Rob Larsen

It made quite a splash recently so I’m sure some of you are curious about Amazon’s new Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, CloudFront. I know the Amazon Web Services suite of tools can be a little intimidating for non-developers, so this article outline how pretty much any reasonably technical person can get themselves up and running on CloudFront and can start reaping the benefits of geographical optimized content delivery.
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Code I Like – Link Prefetching

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I was reading John Resig’s Browser Page Load Performance post earlier today and followed up from there on the concept of Link prefetching. Currently supported by Firefox 2+, Link prefetching is a browser based mechanism for fetching “future” content. Considering I wrote (and ultimately scrapped*) similar functionality for my gallery pages, I was obviously intrigued.
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Twitter Search Results With JSON and Callbacks

Posted on by Rob Larsen

A question was posed in the comments on my JSON Feeds For Fun and Profit Part 2 – Callbacks with Twitter post about handling Twitter search results for a #hashtag. As with the rest of Twitter’s API, dealing with search results is relatively straightforward. This post will examine how to handle a #hashtag search.

If you’re not familiar with JSON or callbacks you might want to read the above referenced post to get up to speed.

Otherwise… it’s on.
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Code I Like: Using Apache's .htaccess and mod_rewrite to Redirect All Traffic to "www"

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I know I was talking about HTML/CSS and JavaScript when I started this series, but I never said anything about being exclusive to the presentation layer 🙂

And heck, there’s always room for Apache when I’m talking about technology…
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