I mess around with this site a lot. This week, in particular, has been interesting. In the past week I:

• Moved my interface images over to CloudFront, Amazon's new Content Delivery Network (CDN.) I'm especially hoping this will increase initial page view performance for my site in Europe and Asia, where I've always had some lag. I'll be monitoring my bounce rate to see if that's the case. The initial results are positive (an overall reduction of 1-2% in my bounce rate over the past week), but the numbers are still too small to really draw any conclusions.
• Took advantage of Firefox's Link Prefetching to speed up all those next gallery links. I tested it out and between link prefetching and all the caching I do, browsing gallery pages in Firefox 2+ is screaming fast.
• Added some copy and rewrote some of the text/labels right here on the blog. Spurred on by the blog chapter in Designing the Obvious, I decided to implement a couple of his recommendations. Within 20 minutes of having read the chapter, I'd changed the header for the comment section, added the little descriptive blurb below it and changed the label for my RSS icon from "FEED" to "Subscribe."

  Small changes all, but maybe they'll improve the experience for folks.

  Or maybe not.

  And if they don't? I'll try something else

This kind of ongoing enhancement is core to the way I approach web design/development. I often speak of sites as being living organisms and this is the kind of thing I do to keep mine growing/evolving in positive ways.

Fun times.