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“.

Custom Metric Beacon allows every instance of ShowSlow to configure metrics it wants to record in addition to YSlow and PageSpeed ranking.

Once metric beacon is configured, simple GET/POST requests can be sent to the beacon with some numeric value which gets recorded and displayed over time on a graph.

You can also click on “Custom Metrics Beacon” on beacon list page (e.g. http://www.showslow.com/beacon/ for public instance) to see interactive form for manual submission.

Custom Metrics can vary depending on your needs, good examples include:

• bounce rate on the page (from your analytics software)
• amount of results on search page (from system configuration)
• server load (from backend monitoring tool)

All these metrics are specific to your needs and you have to write some tools to collect them, but ShowSlow will be able to aggregate them all along with the rest of the data.

For configuration docs, see Installation page on the wiki.