One of our readers just sent me a link to a post about Optimising page load time.
The article contains lots of tips to reduce page load times including tuning of Expiry cache, keepalives and my favourite httpd compression.
Thanks for the link Geoff!
Click on this Link or Drag/Save this link:
!Rossz reverse NZ Geocoder!
to your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar
This is a tech showcase, not a stable product, it might not work sometimes, just play around
Drag/Save this link:
!Rossz NZ Map Mashup!
to your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar
This uses cross domain javascript injection technic(quick hack? ;-)) to inject Zoomin maps to your current webpage. So you can always check out maps of your neighbourhood without leaving the page.
Just simple drag(or right click and select Bookmark this link) it to your boomakrs toolbars.
Thanks for checking it out
Useful link:
Cross domain On-Demand JavaScripting
I was having a look at our webstats and it seems that the average screen sizes are on the rise…
| Screen Size | Percentage |
| 1024×768 | 54.10 % |
| 1280×1024 | 18.30% |
| 800×600 | 9.31% |
| 1280×800 | 5.33% |
| 1152×864 | 3.04% |
| Rest | 10.01% |
Idealog’s article is now online. ProjectX features in the section “
Mash it Up”.
And here’s the link to the full article on Silcion Welly
Just read that IE 7.0 is out… (I’m not going to switch over until they sort out running multiple browser versions.)
I am interested to see how long it takes before IE 7.0 overtakes IE6.0’s market share. This will be interesting to see if IE 7.0 follows the typical Technology adoptation curve. (ie. Innovators / Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards).
Looking at web browser stats on ZoomIn tonight, IE 7.0 is definitely in the early adopter phase on ZoomIn. And Firefox 2.x is even further behind.
| IE 6 | 75.0% | |
| IE 7 | 2.4% | |
| Firefox 1.x<t /> | 15.0% | |
| Firefox 2.x | 0.5% | |
| Safari | 3.7% | |
| Rest | 3.4% |
Anyone want to place some some bets on when IE 7.0 will pass IE 6.0 ?
As some of you may have heard the Wellington Ruby on Rails developers community (WellRailed) is organising a seminar on Ruby on Rails for complete beginners. This doesn’t mean that only beginners should come though. Everyone is welcome as you all have something to contribute, be it a simple question or an insightful answer. The seminar is jointly organised by Tomek Piatek, Tim Haines and Nahum Wild.
What: Getting started with Ruby on Rails – a community based approach
When: 6:30pm, Tuesday, 31st October 2006
Where: CreativeHQ, 25a Marion Street, Te Aro, Wellington (behind Resene Paint)
Map: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/nz/wellington/wellington+central/marion+street/25/
Presented by: Nahum Wild
Intended audience: Anyone interested in Ruby on Rails.
Prerequisites: Interest in Ruby on Rails. Knowledge of programming in any language will be useful during the live demo.
Refreshments: Hell pizza
Cost: Free. It’s a community event. It is our turn to give back.
The format will be as follows:
A traditional computer science refreshment consisting of pizza will be served during the Q&A session by our sponsors ProjectX Technology. Also, the kind folks at The Pragmatic Programmers publishing company have donated a copy of “Agile Web Development with Rails” which will go into a draw on the night. In the spirit of honouring those who taught us and helping those who come after us anyone with more than a year of Rails development experience is not eligible for this prize as you won’t need it. If you are an expert you won’t miss out though as all WellRailed members are now eligible for a 30% discount off all O’Rielly books. Come to the seminar to find out how.
This will be a popular event (how could it not be with all that pizza). Due to the limited size of the venue we can only accommodate 30 people. Please register today by sending an email to tomek.piatek@gmail.com. We will send a notification to the list to let you know how many places remain.
Please help us promote this event by telling your friends about it.
We are group of software developers based in and around Wellington. We share a common passion for technology which can make our lives easier and we want to share our knowledge with other, like-minded people. We have an active mailing list. Everyone is always welcome to subscribe to the list: http://groups.google.com/group/WellRailed. Once you have subscribed you can send your posts to WellRailed@googlegroups.com . You can also access and search through the list archive on the group page http://groups.google.com/group/WellRailed.
I am a programmer therefore I am lazy. You see programmers are a peculiar bunch. We will spend hours trying to figure out how to save 5 minutes. That’s not wasteful at all. It’s called converging on a pure solution. What is wasteful is wading through hundreds of pages of documentation trying to find that thing that does the thing. You know, that thing which you can never find.
This is a list of really handy, time-saving cheat sheets:
I especially like the Prototype cheat sheet. Prototype is vast and I always find myself re-implementing some part of it because I don’t know that it’s already been done. This cheat sheet organises the various parts of Prototype into logical units making it easy to find related information.
Here are some javascript related links that we’ve looking at over the last week.
We’re a Rails shop. We like new technologies. Especially ones that save us on development time. But riding on the cutting edge of technology can sometimes have the rather undesired effect of cutting yourself and bleeding a little. So let me save you some pain by introducing you to a set of tools indispensable when developing Ruby on Rails web applications:
Firefox Web Developer – This excellent toolbar is more than meets the eye. At first you might think that it’s just a regular toolbar with a bunch of buttons whcih serve as shortcuts. Sure it does that but there is so much more. Some of my favourite tools that come with this utility are:
Validate Speed Report – this little gem submits the URL of the current page to a site which evaluates the speed with which the given page loads. It gives you a comparison between dial-up and various flavours of broadband. It warns you if you have too many script files or images.
Resize – ever wondered what would your page look like at 800×600? Any other res? Not a problem, this tool resizes Firefox window to any resolution you pick.
Outline – how many times have you put “border: 1px solid red;” into your CSS to see the outlines of your container elements? Now this essential function is just a mouse click away. You can show outlines of pretty much anything, including tables.
Firefox FireBug – this extension is simply indispensable when you’ve got a lot of JavaScript in your web application. So what do you get?
You get an interactive JS console which lets you execute arbitrary JS expressions including methods on your objects.
You get an interactive JS debugger. The console has a bunch of really useful features, such as the ability to track and report all XMLHTTPRequest objects. This is simply indispensable when you’re developing AJAX applications.
You get a DOM inspector. Switch into interactive inspect mode and as you mouse-over your page the appropriate part of the DOM tree gets highlighted. Or you can go through the tree manually and select the node of interest.
Firefox HTML Validator – HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking at the HTML source of the page. You can evan tell it to fix your page at which point you will get a copy of your page with all validation errors resolved the best that they can be resolved.
Rails script/console – I think that many people don’t know about this, don’t understand this tool or simply forget about it. Yet this is one of the more useful tools wehn writing a Rails app. Basically what you get is an interactive Ruby console (IRB) which hooks into the guts of your application and lets you interact with yourmodels. You can create new instances, inspect existing instances and run any method on any model instance. And if you runthe console with —sandbax argument all database changes will be rolled back on exit.
Here’s another goodie, press TAB to auto-complete method names. If you type in something like “User.” and then press TAB you will get all the methods for the User class.
This command Dispatcher.reset_application! allows you to reload all your model definitions.
I saved the best till last. Once you’re in the console the application object is is available as app. Once you know this, you can do really useful things like:
app.url_for :controller => 'some_controller', :action => 'some_action'
or how about this:
>> helper.pluralize 2, "foo" => "2 foos"
There is so much more. I urge you to just play with it. Experiment. Learn. Enjoy.
tail -f log/development.log – tail is a UNIX shell command which lets you monitor contents of a file as it grows. The development log contains all sorts of really useful information about the execution of your application, such as SQL queries being executed, which controller actions are being called with what parameters and of course error messages
This is a long post but I really wanted to list all those tools in one place because they all complement each other. Happy development!