Speed up your website

The creators at Yahoo have done it once again! What started as 13 rules became 14, the 23, and now 34 best practices for speeding up your website. This is a GREAT article and a MUST READ for any web developer. These 34 items are sorted into 7 categories. Some are pretty advanced and require changes in your server configuration, but many of them are simple changes in your practices that can have a profound change on the the speed of your website, or at least the perceived speed, which is just as important.

Google is once again pushing the limits...

Google has recently released in limited beta a SDK/App Engine/Framework called the Google App Engine, to which you can develop web based applications using the same infrastructure that software like GMail, Google Calendar, and the other Google Apps have been created on, and then host them on the Google servers... their SDK/API is pre-built to handle scaling and heavy traffic loads (up to 5M pageviews/mo with a free account) and increasing storage needs (500mb on free account)... also they give direct access to Google mail API, Google file storage, Google "Datastore" (their db system) and plan on taping into others like calendar... Also, you can use your own custom domain names to point to your apps... Finally, Google is allowing you to use their authentication system for authenticating your users! No more asking users to create yet another login for yet another web application!

Now I'm not saying this is better than hosting your own server, but it is pretty stink'en cool!

One downside is that it currently supports only Python... I might be learning a new programming language! =)

Wez gotz da hookupz

I am pretty excited about this... We have finally been able to order some new audio hardware for "The Block", our kid's church! Hurray!!!

We are getting hooked up with Sure's new PG1288/PG30/PG58 wireless microphone system. It comes with a PG58 Wireless Handheld, a PG30 Wireless Headset and a dual channel PG1288 wireless receiver!

A BIG thanks to my awesome big brother, Jeff Fogg in Pro Audio with Guitar Center Tucson, 520-358-7751... He hooked us up with a PHAT deal... With the whole order, he saved us almost $50 over the cheapest online competitor!

Now, the only thing left to do, is to hurry up and wait for UPS to deliver!

Upper limits of the query string...

So I ran into a problem recently where information was not correctly being passed from one remote page to another... It took quite a bit of digging to finally find the root of this issue. It turns out, that in addition to having to deal with issues with cross-browser compatibility regarding JavaScript, we also have to deal with it regarding the querystring!

Now I know what you are thinking... who in their right mind passes so much information in the querystring that it would reach the upper limits??? I agree with you, but it is currently out of my hands.

Building "widgets" and "plugins" for commercial sites that expect to be able to "remote authenticate" can be quite tricky... especially if they are built on 4th party CMS's that decided to build their own proprietary server side scripting language (that remotely resembles classic asp)...

Okay, long story short, I am passing variables to the remote authenticator via POST variables... that software is then authenticating the users and moving all of those POST variables to the querystring as GET variables to return the user back to the clients CMS where we then process their data... I know, I know, it's an incredibly complex mess, but until the CMS is able to provide us with methods to read and write cookies, we are stuck with it.

So, it turns out that although this specific case works fine with FireFox and even Safari, it breaks in Internet Explorer (what a surprise =). Because of this I did some testing... and here are the results:

Browser      version        querystring upper limit
FireFox      2.0.0.5        8182
Safari       2.0            8184
IE           7.0            2047

YUI and Bookmarklets

I am a big fan of YUI (Yahoo User Interface) as it truly simplifies the cross browser implementation of JavaScript. In some ways it can be bulky, in some ways it's easier to implement my own light-weight controls... In other ways it has revolutionized the way I program JavaScript. Recently I came across one man's idea of implementing YUI everywhere you go. The idea is simple, add a simple script as a bookmarklet and you can utilize the power of YUI on anyones website!
The code is simple:

(function(){
var s = document.createElement('script');
s.src='http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.2.2/build/utilities/utilities.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
})()

Once the script is run you can run additional scripts like:
var all = document.getElementsByTagName('*');for(var i = 0; i < all.length; i++) {new YAHOO.util.DD(all[i])}

Which will make all elements dragable, allowing you to mess with web pages in some pretty unique ways!

It is stuff like this that really makes being a web designer exciting!