First, a short intro – I’ve been thinking of what to do with all the ideas I’m coming up and I’d like to try posting blog entries under “Concepts” category. I’ll accept comments and will write additions to the concept there as well. We’ll see what it’ll be like ;) On my way home today,…

After using drop-in .htaccess file in a few of my projects I realized that people have problems with it because their Apache doesn’t have the modules enabled. Then I realized that apache doesn’t have any of those three modules (mod_deflate, mod_rewrite and mod_expires) enabled by default. It means I found a first project that needs…

Release 0.6 is packed with new stuff – first of all, smoothing that was originally implemented in JavaScript was too slow and got moved to server side in PHP code so now results are still smooth, but not clogging down the browser. Front-end performance is always a priority for ShowSlow project and all performance-related bugs…

It’s very important to speed up your web sites so you don’t loose the users. That being said, many tasks in the checklists from Yahoo or Google are quite complex and are hard to grasp for people who didn’t work all their life configuring Apache or digging deep into the depths of HTTP. To help…

Great news for Semantic Web, Facebook announced that they are going to use more structured metadata in shared web pages then just their original meta tags. There are two parts to it – first they are going to provide storage about all things withing Facebook and on the internet in JSON format so people can…

Many people were frustrated with the graphs ShowSlow was showing as rankings and other measurements change too frequently if your pages are dynamic in nature and show different content on every request. ShowSlow v0.5 is using rolling average to smooth the graphs, hope it’s going to be easier on your eyes and will help you…

WebPageTest.org is getting more and more popular, it was included in Google’s epic announcement that site performance is now part of ranking! So, this Thursday, April 15th, get ready for WebPageTest.org Demo by Nicholas Tang at New York Web Performance Meetup! If you haven’t RSVPed yet, now is your chance! If you can’t attend please update your RSVP…

After I presented ShowSlow at Velocity Online Conference two weeks ago, I got a lot of suggestions regarding the software or a public instance and one of them was from Steve Souders who recommended creating a comparison page where people can see rankings for different sites compared over time. It immediately resonated with me (G…

I’d like to welcome Aaron Kulick to ShowSlow team! Aaron was active user and contributed a few patches and then started to actively contribute documentation to the project wiki: showslow.org. Now Aaron is a full-blown contributor with SVN access and his first contribution is solving the most common problem – how do we automate YSlow…

Useless requests There is a fundamental problem with static assets on the web pages, like images, CSS files and most importantly JavaScript files – they are requested from the server over and over again even if they were not modified between page requests. This slows down page rendering and in case of JavaScripts quite dramatically…