I am cranking through some code examples and plenty of research for this thing. It should kick incredible amounts of JavaScript ass. Come to think of it, it's a ninety minute presentation, so it better kick ass I'm going to look at load times, execution times, ySlow scores, codebase and add pure editorial commentary for several popular libraries (at minimum, jQuery, YUI, Prototype, and Dojo), as well as pure JavaScript and my own bare-bones library.

If you're a Boston JavaScript nerd, I hope to see you there.

Here's the description:

Our next JavaScript Meetup will be held on Thursday, April 30th at Microsoft Research Center located at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge. You should come to the 11th floor to be let in. There is also parking available at a cheap evening rate in the building.

Rob Larsen , Principal Presentation Engineer at Cramer, will demonstrate comparisons between raw JavaScript and utilizing the more popular JavaScript libraries currently available.

After the presentation | demonstration, we will go around the room introducing ourselves and asking the group for advice | opinions on any JavaScript-related issues members are facing.

Microsoft will provide pizza again. What a nice company!

Please RSVP and bring guests. We always have lots of pizza left over.

And the meetup.com link:

April Boston JavaScript Meetup Meeting – JavaScript Library Comparisons – The Boston JavaScript Meetup Group Cambridge, MA – Meetup.com

robreact.com was relaunched over the weekend. There's a completely new visual design, some slightly adjusted architecture and a whole bunch of technical improvements.

Here are some things to keep in mind…
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Yes, another CloudFront post. I'm a penny-pinching, performance minded AWS user, what do you expect?

Anyway, I'm a couple of weeks into my CloudFront experiment and while the traffic numbers are still too fresh to offer any insight on what the speed improvement might be doing for my European and Asian bounce rate (I cache everything, so it should really only affect initial page views,) I do have enough data to compare and contrast the absolute speed difference at play here.

Serving my site sprite from the three different locations I get the following results using pingdom's excellent monitoring service:

As you can see CloudFront is a significant relative improvement over the other two servers (by two and three times.)

Without researching it extensively it seems like a pretty good absolute result as well. While the sprite is slightly larger than the Lookery JS file he used to test, CloudFront performs well within the standard that CacheFly and EdgeCast set when Dave Cancel tested a few different CDN options earlier this year. Granted, his research wasn't exhaustive so someone out there might be pushing closer to 100ms for smaller files, but for the price and ease of use, I'll gladly take 134ms.

Anyone know of any broader research into CDN response times? I'd love to see it if you do, so drop it into the comments.

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.

I was reading John Resig's Browser Page Load Performance post earlier today and followed up from there on the concept of Link prefetching. Currently supported by Firefox 2+, Link prefetching is a browser based mechanism for fetching "future" content. Considering I wrote (and ultimately scrapped*) similar functionality for my gallery pages, I was obviously intrigued.
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