Posts Tagged ‘server’

5 Asset Management Tricks for Faster Websites

5 Asset Management Tricks for Faster Websites

When it comes to front-end performance, good asset management is just as important as good code. Simply put: downloading assets takes time.

Computers and browsers now render pages and execute Javascript faster than ever. Although user bandwidth is increasing, the filesize of assets has been growing in turn.

These factors, combined with the rise of the mobile web, have made bandwidth the primary bottleneck in website performance.

Here are 5 simple steps to reduce download times with better asset management on your sites. Read more…


normalurl.com: Free URL Redirection

normalurl.com: Free URL Redirection

There’s nothing worse than those long, ugly URLs with twenty variables in the query string. In recent years there have been a number of websites offering a free service where users can create shorter links to these complex URLs. While a short URL is great, the links provided by most of these sites are computer generated and impossible to remember.

This weekend I programmed a simple tool to allow users to create their own links and normalize ugly URLs called normalurl.com. Just like other URL rewriting services, this website is completely free and allows anonymous users to easily create new URL redirects. However this … (more…)


Cache-Control and AJAX

Cache-Control and AJAX

Here's some free advice: don't forget the cache-control tags on any server-side AJAX page. I was doing some Geodesic Solutions customization today. Anyone who has dealt with Geo will tell you it's the biggest pain to customize, and that anyone who mentions Geo and best-practices in the same breath must be joking. Basically, the only way to customize it is through a series of patches, or by reworking the Geo class files (which will be overwritten in any upgrade). Geo doesn't allow any mysql calls within the templates (I suppose it's a good security measure), and since I didn't need to do too much database work, I decided to do all the database stuff with AJAX. So far so good. Basically, I was trying to populate a select box with a bunch of options, and I found out that IE … Read more…


Switching Hosting Plans

Switching Hosting Plans

Ok it’s time to come clean…when I first started this website I signed up for hosting thru godaddy.com. Yes yes I know, ugh. Well I’d been too lazy to switch it over (that’s how they get you!) until recently, as I have become interested in deploying Drupal. Well I had Drupal working fine when I found out that I couldn’t clean up the long URLs since godaddy’s “shared hosting” has mod_rewrite turned off and, big surprise, they don’t allow you any shell access. It was pretty annoying because I had been planning on playing with those files to learn the Apache setup. But it turned out to be good news, since I have now switched my hosting to 1and1.com. They’re giving me so much more for actually a little less money, plus the SSH access. Only downside is that a lot of their … Read more…