I’ve been a big fan of the Pragmatic Bookshelf series, in particular their monthly online magazine. The magazine are downloadable in PDF, .mobi, and .epub formats, and browsable online in HTML format. Browsing through the latest couple of issues, I noticed a distinct slowness as some of the images were downloaded. This is usually a hint that a high resolution image is being referenced, but being “cropped” down to a smaller size with the height/width attributes in the HTML. For example, see this story about Ruby Bundler and look at the red ribbon image. The source image is 693×693 but…
After my team launched a new site design and blog system for the [Yahoo! Developer Network][ydn], I decided to review the performance of this site to see where it could be improved. In summary, after removing one performance-hogging widget (Lijit search widget) and following recommendations from YSlow and Page Speed, the site should be running much faster now.
Just ready a story relating to Yahoo on All Things Digital today and noticed they do a really nice job of explaining their use of tracking cookies. I’m impressed with the visual treatment and the fact that they’re very upfront with this information. Of course you’ll only see this message once (or whenever you clear all your browser cookies), but it’s a big improvement over most sites.
Fiddler is an extremely useful tool for debugging any web traffic on Windows environments. While originally designed for use with Internet Explorer, it’s very easy to use Fiddler along with any web browser on a Windows system.
Today I was confirming a reservation with Holiday Inn Express and found a unique anti-pattern on their login dialog: instead of including a check box for “remember me”, they have one for the opposite meaning: “do not remember me”. So much for following well-known conventions on the internet!