No Mod Required

or something

I think I'm coming up with something I really want to play around with this year.

Yes.

If you were wondering- yeah. I do think that's cool.

I didn't even think of the significance of the day when I picked the date for the show. We were talking about it at lunch today and we realized we were going to see the play on the 2052th (is that math right?) anniversary of his *spoiler* death.

Julius Caesar

"FREAKANGELS is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Drop by the Whitechapel Forum to discuss this week's installment."

FreakAngels

One change, excluding beacons from the score, will boost everyone's grade a little bit. Everyone that uses some sort of 1×1px image based analytics package, that is. Me? My home page gained 4 points (up to an 82 :))*

The other important update, to me at least, means that I can fill out the missing companies from the YSlow survey I did a couple of weeks back. There were a few sites that simply wouldn't load the score. That bug appears to be fixed, so the handful of sites that escaped my earlier scrutiny will now go under the lens.

YSlow 0.9.3 Release with Firefox 3 Support (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)

*I also started serving gzipped pages this week, which should have helped the score a little bit. Actually, cached and gzipped, which, scores aside, should speed things up considerably. With this system in place, there's less work done on the server for most requests since all the tough stuff is done once and saved in the cached version and there's significantly less to download because of the compression- my home page saves nearly 10kb, from ~13kb down to 4.6kb. The total page weight of my home page is now down to 52kb.

Faster Rob! Faster!

A fun one to do. This was a massive tree right in the back yard of th eplace we were staying. It demanded to be drawn.

The organizers of the Tour de France announced Wednesday that the Astana team of defending champion Alberto Contador will not be invited to compete in the race or in any other event organized by Amaury Sport Organisation.

While I understand their position at some level (they have to take a stand against doping), banning the defending champion and the third place finisher from last year because of the sins of previous management seems like a mistake to me. I know they're afraid of turning the race into a joke because of all the doping scandals of the past two years, but to decimate the field of top contenders like this lessens the strength of the race to a ridiculous degree. There are three potential podium finishers now out of the race- defending champ Alberto Contador, Levi Leipheimer and Andreas Kloden.

Crazy.

Hopefully the Pro Tour teams and the ASO can come to some sort of agreement to save the competitive integrity of this year's event. I'll still watch of course (if it's still televised here after this that is), but without Astana (and whatever other Pro Tour teams are banned by the ASO) it just won't be the same. At this point, if Slipstream doesn't make it in and there's no movement on this front, it'll be a ghost of a Tour for me.

News Flash: Astana barred from ASO events

Edited to add some reaction to once piece of news that makes me want to say "Cadel Evans, you rule"

"The 2007 Tour runner-up Cadel Evans has already said that he does not want to start the Tour without his main rivals. "

From: Playing with firee

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Another excellent book. The ideas outlined here would be of benefit to any web application. Small or large, the idea of paring down features to only those "necessary for the users to complete the activity the site is meant to support" is a noble one. I've, more often than I'm comfortable admitting, worked on projects where feature bloat ruled the day and I can tell you from bitter experience, giving in to "nice to have" features can be the absolute death of a project. The biggest disaster I've ever worked on was mostly sunk by feature bloat and lack of focus*.

There's plenty to take away from this well written examination of what's right and wrong with modern web application design. I read this on vacation and while I wouldn't have traded the hammock I was on or the excellent wine I was drinking for anything, some small part of me thought "wow, I'd love to be able to put some of this stuff to work immediately."

One thing I don't fully agree with is Hoekman's admonition, later on in the book, to throw away specifications and requirement documents. While that might work for the less complication applications he outlines in his book (excellent applications all), there's no way to do, for example, a detailed financial services application without relying on solid documentation. When there are complicated business rules in place throwing a developer and a designer in a room with a white board and having them "work it out" just isn't going to cut it.

Still, with a smaller scale, less structured application, the techniques and approaches in Designing the Obvious will be of benefit to anyone working in field of web application design and development. This is a recommended read.

*there was also a painful stab in the chest by a web application framework from hell to help that project into its grave.

Pro JavaScript Design Patterns An excellent book. There are plenty of takeaways from this intense examination of Object Oriented programming in JavaScript. I haven't worked on a project large enough to really benefit from OO JavaScript in the overall (classes/inheritance, etc), but even without switching over to a fully OO framework, there are optimization patterns and namespace patterns outlined in this book that can immediately prove useful no matter what scale of project you're working on.

From a pure "oh, that's cool!" perspective, the chapter on Chaining was a real eye opener. I'd looked at jQuery code, of course, but I'd never sat down to think about how he might have created the().ability().t0().keep().mashing().functions().together(). It's diabolically simple in concept (return this!), but also mighty powerful. Again, it's not one of the patterns I'm looking to adapt any time soon, but it was crazy interesting how simple it is in concept.

Another one in this style.

Got firebug? Load this test page: Simple Style Graffiti Canvas and watch as I load the "previous" and "next" pages with XHR, parse out the image tags in each, adding them to the users cache.

Is there any reason I wouldn't want to do that?

The performance benefit in the browser is a huge reason TO do it.

But what about the flip side?

I'm already thinking about the extra requests that might not be actually used by visitors who don't follow the back and next path? Those could add up maybe. If I implemented this my site would handle an extra 3 php requests per initial page load and then two cached requests and one new request each additional page. But, that doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Again, am I missing something?

Anything else?