Learning the World

I always wanted to implement one thing since I started the blog: a simple inclusion of Amazon items. I didn’t want to search through results that existing plugins provided. When I wrote about something like a book, I already used machine tags to identify the subject! So I found the inspiration to write my first real WordPress plugin: Amazon Machine Tags. […]

Nate Koechley presented the research results of the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team two weeks ago in London. The traditional focus of performance optimization has been on the backend, i.e. system efficiency. But comparing a number of high profile websites, the Yahoo! team found that frontend performance is responsible for 80-98% of the perceived response time. Therefore doubling the frontend performance gains more than doubling the backend performance. […]

Based on Nate Koechley’s concept of graded browser support we terminated support for Firefox 1.5 because it’s no longer supported and upgraded by Mozilla. Also we changed Opera support from 9.0 to 9.x, where “x” stands for the latest stable version. […]

In the last six months I became more aware of techniques for optimizing website performance. I learned about memory leaks and JavaScript performance, but what impressed me most was Nate Koechley’s presentation about large scale website performance issues in “Yahoo! vs. Yahoo!” at the @media conference 2006. In the meantime there have been more blog posts about particular aspects of performance optimization, so I wrote a summary. […]

Nate Koechley introduced Yahoo!’s smart concept of graded browser support nine months ago. Until then we did test on a lot of browsers, but all browsers were supported equal. Now came this man who suggested distinctions... Almost unnoticed were two updates of the browser matrix in August and a couple of days ago. […]