Scripts.Indisguise.Org - a hobbyist's blog and scripts archive

Alright, shameless promotion time. One of the early projects I’ve been involved in when I joined Yahoo! was a Yahoo! Answers plugin for the SEA region, which Jaydee (of TipidPC fame) was already working on. All the snazzy JS effects was done by him, while I contributed the user interface for the plugin (so you know who to complain to if you don’t like the design!).

All the countries in SEA with localized Yahoo! Answers will have their own version of the plugin, but for now, the Yahoo! Answers Singapore plugin is out! So if you live in Singapore or is curious about the plugin, give it a whirl. :)

For a long time now I’ve been looking for a good tool to help optimize the pages I’m making, especially with the onset of some really mysterious timing out happening over at my writing blog. Firebug helps in showing me how long each page element loads, but that’s pretty much it.

What’s great is that Yahoo! has released the previously-internal Firebug extension YSlow, which grades web pages according to a list of criteria which impacts page load performance. The criteria that YSlow looks at was discussed by Nate Koechley during the High Performance Web Sites presentation at the @media conference in London this year, which I’ll list below:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
2. Use a CDN
3. Add an Expires header
4. Gzip components
5. Put CSS at the top
6. Move scripts to the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookup
10. Minify JS
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Configure ETags

I tested it out on my writing log, and I certainly wasn’t surprised to see it failed (its grade was F)! This blog scored a C, which is passable, I suppose, but should really be better. What’s wonderful about YSlow is that it also itemizes what made your score low, and what makes each item’s score low. For example, for my writing log, it told me:

Minimize HTTP requests: F

This page has 17 external JavaScript files.
This page has 23 CSS background images.

So obviously, given the comments, you have a clearer view of what needs to be done in order to optimize your website to speed up loading time.

I’ve only started using it, but it’s a really nifty, useful tool. Remember that it’s a Firebug plugin, and so you have to have the Firebug plugin installed in Firefox to get it to work. (Firebug itself is a fabulous plugin, so it’s a good idea to have it installed, especially if you work with JS and AJAX.)

I haven’t been able to do any proper public blogging (or much hobby design or development work, for that matter) for a while now because of some pretty exciting developments so far: I have been in Singapore since early last week, and I have just started working as a web developer/front-end engineer for Yahoo! Southeast Asia. My best friends will now be HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with a little PHP. Words cannot completely express my excitement and anticipation at this new opportunity! I will now proceed to pepper my statements with exclamation points!!

Kidding aside, I’m still easing into everything, and even when I’ve been here for a longer period of time, I still won’t be able to go into a lot of details about work in Yahoo!, but what does this mean for my hobby work, my linkware scripts, this blog and scripts archive?

It means I’ll probably be a bit more exposed to new and emerging web trends and technologies and techniques, revolving around how things look, usability, accessibility, and stuff like that. That’s quite a bit more time to immerse myself with web things, which I have always wanted to do, and might probably impact either blog posts here or scripts I create/update (hopefully for the better! ;)).

It will hopefully mean that as my involvement with work!PHP will be lesser this time around, I might have more interest in working with PHP in my own free time. A lot of the development for my scripts have stalled because of two things: work (and travel to/from it) keeps me busy, and when I do get time to putty around, I don’t feel like working with the same things I’ve been working with the whole week (read: PHP). That’s just the way it really is. I’m hoping that my love for PHP work/coding gets revived (not that it really died, but you know what I mean) and that I can finally push in a lot of the things I have planned for my scripts, especially Enthusiast.

It will also hopefully mean more fun postings about tech and various non-sensitive Yahoo! stuff. :D For non-tech updates or maybe tech ramblings that are far too random for this blog, there is always my Livejournal, which anyone can watch if they so like. I do post publicly there time and time again.

I’ll see you around. ;)