Improve Web Page Performance

There are a lot of articles available over the internet for the same. But I found few handy for me & It will surely help the developers who are not in much of it yet. Few of the points specified over here are based on the assumption that CDN is used for the static contents, while other may work without CDN requirement.

So let me do it point vise:

1. Make fewer HTTP Requests

• Make appropriate Sprites. CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests. Combine your background images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment.
  
• Use combo handlers to reduce the http requests
  
• Use inline code if code is small (JS/CSS)

2. Reduce DNS Lookups.

3. Use a CDN for static components.

4. Add an Expire Header

5. Compress / Gzip appropriate components.

6. Put CSS at Top.

7. Put JS at Bottom.

8. Avoid much JavaScript/CSS code as Inline.

9. Minify Javascript.

10. Avoid Redirects.

11. Optimize the images

• Use optimized favicon (favicon cann't be served from CDN)
  
• Use SmushIt.
  
• Check for unnecessary use of high quality images. eg. 45KB 300x200 dimention.
  
• Remove duplicate images.
  
• Use background-repeat CSS property for the continous images with gradient, by picking up appropriate slice of image.
  
• For the continous images without gradient, use CSS background-color. For the rounded corner use CSS properties or corner images.
  
• Avoid empty space while making sprites.
  

12. Do the Post-loading of the components, which are not in visible area intially. eg. which can be seen only after scrolling down.

13. Use AJAX to fatch the components, which are not visible in page initially. eg. tab like structure

14. Make AJAX cacheable.

Yahoo! is the clear leader in the Research for Performance. That's why I always prefer to give reference from Yahoo! sites. Like for the more performance tips in detail please refer Yahoo! performance rules.

Enjoy improved performance.

Survey Finds Privacy an Increasing Concern to Consumers

Most Trusted Companies; Survey Finds Privacy an Increasing Concern to Consumers; Google No Longer Among Top 20

(Extracted from The San Francisco Chronicle, December 15, 2008) Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!, Verizon and FedEx for the first time have made an annual ranking of the top 20 most trusted companies in the United States. Google, however, dropped off the list, released today by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe in San Francisco, as did Countrywide Financial, Bank of America (which acquired Countrywide) and Weight Watchers. At No. 1, for the fourth year in a row, was American Express, followed by eBay, IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson. This the fifth year the survey has been conducted.

2008 Ranking	2008 Ranking
1 American Express (remained number one)	12 Intuit (+7)
2 eBay (+6)	13 WebMD (-1)
3 IBM (no change)	14 Yahoo! (new to the top 20)
4 Amazon (+1)	15 Facebook (new to the top 20)
5 Johnson & Johnson (+1)	16 Disney (-1)
6 Hewlett Packard (+10)	16 AOL (-12)
6 U.S. Postal Service (+1)	17 Verizon (new to the top 20)
7 Procter & Gamble (+2)	18 FedEx (new to the top 20)
8 Apple (new to the top 20)	19 US Bank (-2)
9 Nationwide (remained the same)	20 Dell (-7)
10 Charles Schwab (-8)	20 eLoan (-9)
11 USAA (+4)

more info...

Call Ezee Receives Strategic Investment from Yahoo!

Bangalore, December 18, 2008: Info Network Management Company Pvt. Ltd. (INMAC) today announced a strategic investment from Yahoo!, a global internet leader. Chennai based INMAC is more popularly known by its consumer brand, Call Ezee. With this investment, Yahoo!’s Dutch subsidiary acquired approximately 30% stake in INMAC, along with representation on INMAC’s Board.

Call Ezee is a telephone directory search service currently covering 14 cites across India, including the 6 largest cities – Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Consumers can call the local Call Ezee number from any mobile or fixed line phone and request contact details of any business, or a list of businesses that offer the product or service they are looking for. INMAC expects the funding provided by Yahoo! to enable it to continue to develop its team and technology as it seeks to triple its reach across India over the next two years.

Since its inception in 2006, Call Ezee has gained the loyalty of both businesses and consumers by fulfilling their advertising and directory needs. Small businesses focused on Return on Investment (ROI) find Call Ezee to be efficient in generating new sales leads, while consumers appreciate the ability to receive instant information on businesses in their local area, free of cost. Indian businesses can also contact Call Ezee to be listed on the directory without any charge, although sales leads are charged on a premium listing or ‘pay for performance’ basis.

INMAC plans to continue to differentiate itself from competitors with its in-depth knowledge of local markets, advanced data collection abilities and new product launches aimed at increasing advertisers’ ROI.

About INMAC

INMAC is a large tele-information services provider present in 14 cities across India with another 6 cities expected to be added in the near term. With unique access numbers, detailed database of listings and a large sales force across most major cities in India, INMAC is today poised to transition to the next stage of growth. Within 2 years of launch, INMAC has garnered strong market share in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, and has demonstrated excellent growth in newer markets such as Mumbai and Delhi. INMAC aims to replicate its success across more cities inIndia and become a nationally recognized brand for directory services. INMAC has been promoted by Mr. TS Narayanaswamy who has nearly two decades of experience as a leading sales associate for large multinational banks.

About Yahoo! Inc.

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit pressroom.yahoo.com (http://pressroom.yahoo.com/) or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal (http://yodel.yahoo.com/).

Back-Button to the Future : Adobe - Zoetrope

A new tool makes it easier to see the Web changing over time.

Huge quantities of information are never more than a few clicks away on the Web, but it's not always easy to see what things were like yesterday. News stories and blog posts might be archived, but other information often gets lost. For instance, while it's trivial to find a book's sales ranking on Amazon today, it's less simple to see what it was last week. And for anyone curious about how news evolves, it might not be obvious how a story's prominence has changed--did it get top billing on news sites the day it broke, or was it buried at the bottom of the page? A new tool called Zoetrope is designed to help track such information by letting users browse backward through time.

A user can peer back in time through Zoetrope in several ways. Simply pulling a scrollbar at the bottom of the browser winds a Web page back to show what it looked like hours, days, or months ago. Or, if the user is interested in one specific piece of information, like the price of a certain product, he or she can draw a "lens" over that area of the page to see how it changes.

An experienced user can perform even more-advanced analysis. For example, configured correctly, Zoetrope will recognize a price as it goes up or down and will show the results as a graph. It's also possible to draw lenses on different websites and sync them in order to carry out a historical comparison. For example, a user could use one lens to track weather information and another lens to track movie-attendance figures. Looking at how both lenses change over time might reveal a correlation between bad weather and high movie turnout. Zoetrope can also track some pieces of data as they move about a page over time.

For the video check here.

Google Confirms Friend Connect

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

Friend Connect will work with existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, as well as with data access APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace. The announcement comes on the heels of similar announcements from MySpace and Facebook (MySpace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect)

Try here

YouTube offers deep links to timestamps (via URI hash) !!!

YouTube now features the option to jump to a certain time in the video directly by adding a timestamp hash to the URL. For example:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsKB7SWCVjQ&feature=rec-HM-fresh+div#t=1m54s

They also automatically create links from comments that mention timestamps. This all is something that I’ve been hacking into YouTube with the YouTube captioner and other people building Splicd.

I guess the next natural step would be to show the timestamped comments as annotations just like Viddler does it.

A spot of rain on the parade is that the geo IP redirect in YouTube breaks timestamped links as you get sent from www. to uk. (for example here in the UK as found by Simon Willison). This should be easy to fix though, please?

Restore Google Search Integration In Firefox Browser Address Bar After Installing Yahoo IM (toolbar)

By default Firefox browser location bar is associated with Google I'm Feeling Lucky search. When users type a keyword like "Google Maps" in location bar Firefox performs I'm Feeling Lucky search and takes users directly to maps.google.com page.

But this feature disappears after installing Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo IM hijacks this feature by replacing Google I'm Feeling Lucky with Yahoo search engine without our consent.

If you want that feature back then follow these simple steps to restore Google's I'm Feeling Lucky

1. Open Firefox browser
2. Type about:config in location bar and press enter
3. Search for configuration key keyword.URL and select it
4. Right click on the configuration key keyword.URL and choose Reset from the shortcut menu. Firefox automatically reset value to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
5. That's all. From now onwards Firefox uses Google's I'm Feeling Lucky when you type keywords in URL bar.

Google Code Jam .. Don't miss

Do you enjoy solving tough problems and grappling with technical challenges? Then enter Google Code Jam!

Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice.

Google Code Jam begins in July and continues in August, when you will compete in online rounds against contestants from around the world. The Top 500 participants will advance to onsite competitions at a local Google office to compete against those in their region (Asia Pacific; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and the Americas). The Top 100 will participate in the final round at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California on Friday, November 14.

Don't be left out! Make sure to register between June 17 and July 17, and show your coding creativity in Google Code Jam.

Visit : http://code.google.com/codejam/

Isro aims to rival Google Earth

Press Trust Of India / Kolkata
Adding a feather to its cap, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will launch its own satellite imagery on the internet six months from now, rivalling popular mapping service Google Earth.
"Our images will be on our website six months from now," Isro Chairman G Madhavan Nair told reporters here after receiving the Rammohan Puraskar.

Pointing out that certain locations with high security risks were prohibited by law from being imaged, he said, "We are figuring that out. The remaining places, of course, would be on the net."

Earlier, while receiving the award, Nair pointed out that India had the world's largest constellation of remote-sensing satellites.

"With seven satellites in orbit, our remote-sensing satellites provide imagery of the earth in a variety of spectral bands and with a resolution of better than one metre. Data from our remote-sensing satellites are received at about 20 stations across the globe, including the US and Europe," he said.

Nair said the Village Resource Centres (VRC) established in 2004 were providing a variety of space-based products and services, including tele-education, tele-medicine and information on natural resources.

There were 400 VRCs in the country and of these seven are located in West Bengal, he said, adding there were plans to set up 20 more in the state.

Links ...

Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5

Version Control with Subversion

Mastering the VI editor

An A-Z Index of the Linux BASH command line

Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands

Google's Latest: Wireless Data Via Balloon ..

This can't be a rumor, because The Wall Street Journal reported it; Google is considering contracting with a company with the exotic name of Space Data, or even buying it. This bit of news might just become that much hot air after a few weeks, but it's quaintly interesting nevertheless -- because it involves sending up balloons to extend a long-range cell network, or a wide-area broadband) Internet network. In short, it goes like this: there's a tower at place A, and place B, hundreds of kilometres away, has no coverage -- so send up a balloon with transceivers into the stratosphere at place B, and the network gets extended. In fact, a signal could get spread across thousands of square kilometres this way; word is that an equivalent feat via cellular towers would need 40 of them to be put up.

No, we aren't kidding, and neither are they: balloons are an inexpensive proposition (just plastic and some gas, to be precise, and the transceivers aren't expensive either), so wireless service could be offered in remote areas at a low cost. Space Data isn't fumbling with a new concept: it already launches 10 balloons a day across parts of the southern US, providing telecom services to oil companies, among others. Their technology is even used by the US Air Force.