links for 2008-06-10
June 10th, 2008 | Published in Bookmarks
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open source flash video player
links for 2008-06-07
June 7th, 2008 | Published in Bookmarks
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Wow. This is an amazing web based tool that feels a lot like keynote
Green Blogging at Beer and Blog Tonight
June 6th, 2008 | Published in Announcements, Portland, Uncategorized
I’m leading an informal session on web site performance and how it helps the environment at Beer and Blog this afternoon. I’ve put up a post on Cloud Four’s blog talking more about the connection between performance and the environment. If you’re in the Portland area, it would be great to see you.
Smart Optimizer
June 6th, 2008 | Published in CSS, Javascript, Web Development
One of the bigger problems I see in the performance space is that a lot of the value of current content management systems and blogging tools is the ability to add widgets or plugins from a lot of different places. These plugins often do not provide compressed and cacheable versions of their content.
In order to get more people to adopt the methods of creating faster web pages, we need to make it easier for them to do so while still a making it easy for them to adhere to performance guidelines. Basically, make it possible for them to eat cat and lose weight at the same time.
I’ve spent part of last evening looking for plugins for Wordpress that will find any javascript or css files, combine them into a single file, minify and gzip them, and then set far future expires headers. I’ve got a dream plugin in mind and none of them are quite living up to my fantasy.
One solution that comes close to being my dream is a piece of software called Smart Optimizer. Smart Optimizer used to be called JSmart. It was a project that hadn’t had any updates since July 7, 2006 until two weeks ago when the project was revitalized and the name changed.
Smart Optimizer will:
- Set up rewrite rules to intercept any calls to css or js files
- Minify, gzip any css or js files
- Creates static files on the server for css and js that are gzipped and set for caching
- Concatenate css or js files into a single file
It’s an interesting tool that I don’t think a lot of people know of. Take a look.
links for 2008-06-04
June 4th, 2008 | Published in Bookmarks | 1 Comment
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PHPBench.com was constructed as a way to open people’s eyes to the fact that not every PHP code snippet will run at the same speed.
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The report identifies emerging trends in “mobile activism” through 11 case studies, and highlights the results of a global survey of NGO usage of mobile technology.
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SMS marketing service
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Integrate Campaign Monitor with drupal
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Nice date picker with quick pick ranges
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Surprisingly high number of mobile phones in the US that don’t support cookies
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Exceptional list of tips for iPhone users
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Schedule text messages as reminders
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Leverage Google’s content delivery network for common javascript libraries.
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“Safire is an open source framework written in HTML/CSS/JS. It make’s building/porting applications to the iPhone ridiculously easy.”
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Keepmovingcomputingtaskstowhereenergyisavailable
Keep moving computing tasks to where energy is available. Cheaper to transmit data rather than energy. -
58% of U.S. adults have used cell phones or PDAs for text-messaging, taking a picture, looking for directions or surfing the Web
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“Why does latency have such a huge impact on page loading speed? After all, to load a page completely a web browser just needs to fetch the page source and all the associated resources. The browser makes multiple connections to servers and tries to load a
Speed Up Your AJAX With Google AJAX Libraries
June 3rd, 2008 | Published in AJAX, Javascript, Web Development
Dion Almaer of Google and Ajaxian.com announced late last week the AJAX Libraries API. If you use AJAX, you’ll want to pay attention to this announcement. What does it mean?
Popular AJAX libraries including:
- jQuery
- prototype
- script.aculo.us
- MooTools
- dojo
are now being hosted on Google’s servers for use on your site or applications. Why would you link to a file hosted on Google’s server? Because it is optimized for speed by providing the libraries in the following way:
- Gzipped
- Minified
- Far future expires headers to increase caching
- Delivered using Google’s extensive content delivery network
They are providing multiple versions of each library and even include a javascript loader for the libraries. For more on the benefits of this service, check out Steve Souder’s coverage and Dion’s extensive information on Ajaxian.
If you are using any of these AJAX libraries, you would be foolish not to seriously consider taking advantage of this service.
New, Faster Version of jQuery Released
June 3rd, 2008 | Published in AJAX, Javascript, Web Development
“A new release of jQuery is out — 1.2.6, skipping directly from 1.2.3. Most noteworthy are the performance improvements.” via Ajaxian. Further details in the release notes.
links for 2008-06-03
June 3rd, 2008 | Published in Bookmarks
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A comprehensive set of stencils. Great stuff.
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Using css transformations to flip web page
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Good breakdown of the differences
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For those ready to sell as soon as they can get the upcoming 3G version
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WebKit’s core JavaScript engine just got a new interpreter, code-named SquirrelFish. SquirrelFish is 1.6 times faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter.
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A continuously updated list of all CSS properties:
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SkyBlueCanvas is designed specifically for those instances when more robust systems like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal are too much horsepower.
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Hook campaignmonitor up to google analytics
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search and buy amazon products via sms
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iPhone demographics
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Story behind one of my favorite Thomas Hawk’s photos
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GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website
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WebKit now supports gradients specified in CSS. There are two types of gradients: linear gradients and radial gradients.
Flood Warnings via SMS
June 2nd, 2008 | Published in Mobile | 1 Comment
“Cell phones will now tell Italians when the tide is high in Venice. The city government just launched a free text message alert system for the floods which frequently put La Serenissima under several feet of water.” Originally from Zoomata and highlighted by Textually.
I wonder how long it will take before the U.S. starts to realize that SMS-based alerts would be much more effective than radio and television alerts. There’s a whole generation that the public broadcasting alert system would miss who are listening to their iPods and watching IPTV instead of the networks.
links for 2008-05-31
May 31st, 2008 | Published in Bookmarks
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A JupiterResearch survey found that 33% of broadband shoppers are unwilling to wait more than four seconds for a web page to load, whereas 43% of narrowband users will not wait more than six seconds (Akamai 2006).
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mobile barcode scanning solving fixed lens issues
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From a while back. Caused a lot of controversy at the time. Argues on device apps are going to be replaced by mobile web apps.
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mobile advertising service including sms
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Location-based SMS text messages service. Being used by realtors
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The Betavine API lets you interact with mobile & web services. It allows you to send text messages, push web links to mobiles and access Betavine content. API calls are available in a variety of formats including XML, JSON and RSS.
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Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight text on web pages and then gives you a small link to the highlighted page.
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long tail search analytics for seo efforts
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Great software for creating timelines
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The result is CiUI (CNET iPhone UI) that mimics iPhone UI behavior. It’s already being used on CNET’s iPhone page (http://iphone.cnet.com). It’s been greatly inspired by iUI with a few key differences:
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A sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns.