CodeClimber

Yesterday I wrote about the support for enclusures that has been introduced with Subtext 2.0. Today I’m going to talk about the improvements we introduced to our skinning engine in order to reduce the number and the size of HTTP requests. And we added support for mobile browsers as well. Web Performance Optimization It all started last year, when Yahoo released YSlow, an add-on for Firebug that measures the performance of a web page based on the best practices evangelized by the Yahoo’s team for Exceptional Performance. Pushed by Mads Kristensen I improved the performances of my own blog with some...

Yesterday Steve Souders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, released a new version of YSlow, the tool to help you improve the performances of your website. Version 0.8 fixes a bug in the Firebug NET panel, where cached pages sometimes show up in the network monitor: here is a detailed explanation of problem and how to enable the fix. They also fixed a small problem that caused stylesheets with mixed case not to be recognized as being in the head of the document (rule 5). If you already installed YSlow, you already saw the update via the Firefox auto-update feature, otherwise you...

Mads Kristensen, after reading my report about the score given by YSlow to his and other blogs, improved his score and challenged me to do the same. After 20 days, recovering from the time zone shift, and after a few days of holidays, yesterday evening I finally managed to try and improve my score: with some manual tuning to the CSS, the JavaScript files and Subtext masterpage I improved my score by 77% (28 points, from 36 to 64). I didn't beat Mads's score which is 67 (was 71 at the time of the challenge), but his improvement was 15 points, which is almost...

Following the release of YSlow, there has a lot buzz around the rules it evaluates. And even if not all the 13 rules are issues for normal websites, some of them, like gzipping all the static text files (CSS and JS) and minifying JavaScript are good advices also for websites with not so many users as Yahoo!. At Yahoo! they suggested to use JSMin, a tool developed by Douglas Crockford, a guy working for Yahoo!. JSMin is only a minifier: it removes comments, unnecessary whitespace and linefeeds but does not change the name of variables or functions to shorter identifiers...

In the last weeks there has been a lot of talking around YSlow, the tool that the Yahoo! Developer Network released to check sites against their 13 rules of High Performance Web Sites. Last week I used it against various blogs and I found out that my blog is rated only 36/100. So, also after the challenge started by Mads, I decided to try and improve my score. The final score is a weighted average between the scores for each of the 13 rules. This means that some rules are more important than others and to increase the score of a site...

A few days ago I posted about Firebug, the Swiss Army Knife of the developers' plugins. Last week Yahoo released an add-on for Firebug: YSlow. YSlow measures web page performance based on the best practices evangelized by Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team. Since many of these best practices focus on the frontend, YSlow is integrated with Joe Hewitt's Firebug, the web development tool of choice for frontend developers. After checking your site against the 13 rules of High Performance Web Sites, it rates the performances of your site with an A to F grade. I run the tool on a...