I added a few features to ShowSlow in a past couple weeks, but being also busy with HowDoable, I didn’t have time to write about them so here you go – a short digest:

Limit URLs using PCRE regexes

You can now limit URLs to be accepted by ShowSlow using PCRE regular expressions (thanks for initial patch from Aaron). All you need to do is to use a regex instead of just prefix in $limitURLs array – ShowSlow will automatically detect that it’s not a URL prefix and match against it using preg_match.

DBUpgrade for easy data schema upgrades

I’ve started to use another open source project of mine called DBUpgrade to help you with database schema upgrades going from version to version. Going forward, if you’ll need to upgrade the schema, all you’ll have to do is run php dbupgrade.php or just make (which is going to run svn update too). tables.sql will still contain latest schema so feel free to update manually.
DBUpgrade requires MySQLi module to be configured with your PHP, it is also recommended if you’re using MySQL 4.1.3 and later (and you should be).

HAR beacon

And finally, I worked with Jan “Honza” Odvarko who is one of the lead developer of Firebug and related extensions to add HTTP Archive (HAR) support to ShowSlow and beacon support to NetExport Firebug extension (use v0.7b12+) that allows to save contents of Net Panel and later view it. HAR is also supported by HTTPWatch, a tool that created original xml-based export format HAR was based upon.

By default, beacons are sent to http://www.showslow.com/beacon/har/ but you can reconfigure it to point to your own instance using extensions.firebug.netexport.beaconServerURL Firefox config variable (at about:config).

You can see sample result here. For configuration options, see documentation on showslow.org

That was a lot of stuff – I should be reporting about developments more often.

Go ahead and try it all, let me know how it works and if you have any troubles using these features. If you feel you need more features in ShowSlow, go ahead, submit them to our UserVoice forum and email the mailing list to discuss and gain supporters: http://groups.google.com/group/showslow.

Our friend and ex-New Yorker, Joe Devon started Web Performance Meetup group in the sunny Los Angeles.

Can’t wait to see what the group is going to discuss and maybe one day I’ll be able to go and visit them ;)

If you’re in the area, come and sign up!

DBUpgrade project got a new site, logo and @dbupgrade twitter account.

DBUpgrade.org is a wiki site so please feel free to help me documenting it, providing your own solutions and describing your use cases.

This is not much, but quite enough for a small open source project to survive.

Go ahead, subscribe to this blog and twitter if you’d like to get updates about the project.

Sometimes query strings can differ for a reason un related to performance and you want to have them ignored as all pages that are identical before the ? mark have the same characteristics.

Thanks to rachenj who submitted the bug to Show Slow bug tracker, now we have this feature.

Configuring query string pruning is easy, just set $dropQueryStrings = true if you want to drop all query strings or set it to an array of URL prefixes to match.

You can find full documentation on the wiki:

http://www.showslow.org/Installation#Drop_query_strings_from_URLs

Go ahead and download latest code from trunk:

http://code.google.com/p/showslow/source/checkout

Have fun and post your suggestions to the mailing list and bug reports to the issue tracker.

I was listening to a long awaited interview with Seth Godin that Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley from Startup Success Podcast just released and Seth said something (11:38 in mp3) that resonated with me immediately:

…I use a resistance as a compass. If I’m uncomfortable about doing something, if I hear the voice of the lizard brain, that’s exactly what I choose to do…

This is exactly the “path of the most embarrassment” that I wrote about some time ago. This is the feeling that I found. The one that is so easy to differentiate from the comfortable fuzzy feeling that boring stuff brings.

It feels so good to have a validation by Seth, I think I should listen to this lizard brain more often not to step away from the path of the most embarrassment. Wait… good feelings should be avoided, don’t they…

O’Reilly Velocity OnLine Conference is scheduled for March 17 and Steve Souders was kind enough to invite me to give a talk titled “Keeping Track of Your Performance Using Show Slow“.

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