In our sophisticated, fast-paced, ultra-modern world of email, Twitter and all other things ADHD, I guess it was destined to come to this, and so I have to say, I think DailyLit is an absolutely brilliant idea! Now I gotta go get my read on!
Notes from Scott Jehl’s An Event Apart Boston presentation. Lots of good points, including:
- Every http request we require is a gamble: a chance to fail.
- Every user is a non-Javascript user while a page is loading. Act accordingly.
- Javascript, on average, is 196KB per transfer… equivalent to 6 times the amount of code used on the Apollo missions.
- Cutting down the number of http requests is the best way to improve performance. QuickConcat is a tool that combines a number of files… into a single XML document that… gets parsed on client.
- CSS is a blocking element… eCSSential is a Javascript tool that decides which style sheets should load and when using media query statements.
- Images are 63% of file size on Web pages.
- Pretty much all responsive image solutions today break in one way or another… Picturefill is a Javascript polyfill that brings similar support to a DIV-based solution. This prevents pre-fetching images that are not needed.
- Javascript is the second largest part of our pages and it blocks page rendering until loaded… Enhance.js is a Javascript pattern that loads only the scripts a particular device needs.
Most of the above links can be found under the SouthStreet umbrella.
WeeNudge is an interesting collection of articles to help “Teach your clients about the mysteries of the web”… We’ve all had clients where that was possible and some where it was even unnecessary, but otherwise, good luck with that…
And speaking of clients, ever had something that you were working on your localhost and wanted to show the client, so you fire up your FTP, create a new folder on your public host, upload all the files, then realize all the references that need to be changed to make it work there? Check-out showoff.io, which let’s you temporarily expose your localhost via a showoff.io URL… And I have just such a client right now…
HUGE slidedeck from Velocity 2011 Conference (I know, when??), mostly stuff we all know by now, but still a few things that I found new or interesting, take a quick skim through looking for hidden gems for yourself.
And speaking of performance, none other than Stoyan Stefanov has made available online (well, most of it) his Book of Speed. At first-blush most seems to be info covered previously elsewhere, but as usual, there are always bits floating that are worth skimming for.
How many of these CSS oddities did you already know?
I absolutely love it that the Photoshop world has finally addressed the amount of life wasted waiting for Photoshop to do something…
And finally, a few words to honor the ever-humble, rarely-changing, yet ever-so-useful paperclip…
Happy reading,
Atg