Broken Links
I’ve been getting madder and madder about the increasing use of dorky web
links; for example,
twitter.com/timbray has become
twitter.com/#!/timbray.
Others have too; see
Breaking the Web with hash-bangs
and
Going Postel. It dawns on me
that a word of explanation might be in order for those who normally don’t
worry about all the bits and pieces lurking inside a Web address.
Anti-Personalization
We can learn a massive amount about people from their interactions on the internet. What kinds of products can we build now that we have this capability?
When I started thinking about these products, someone told me that he thinks personalization is bad for democracy. At first I thought that notion was absurd – after all, it is not as if the Fox News enthusiasts are out buying copies of Marx's works in order to broaden their view.
But I have thought more about this, and I have come to agree in some respects. Another friend, Drew Conway, pointed me to a book called Republic.com 2.0, by Cass Sunstein.
Managing Facebook Like. Or not.
I’M ON FACEBOOK. I want to see everything I supposedly “like” and prune the list of things I don’t. There should be a page where I can do this—that’s UX Design 101—but instead there’s just a sidebar box on my profile page showing a rotating, random sampling of liked items. The box is fine as an outward-facing device: on my profile page, it gives visitors a teasing hint of some of the cool stuff a deep guy like me digs. But inward-facing-wise, as a tool for me to manage my likes, it’s useless.
Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache
Webmaster Level: All
Last year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier — ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.
So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.
Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:
Read more on Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache…