I used to use AddThis for social bookmarking here on the blog. And by "used to" I mean up until two days ago . Over the past couple of days I've been working on setting up my own version to use here and throughout the rest of the site. I launched it yesterday.
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High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers This book? All kinds of interesting. I've been writing about performance a little bit here recently and this well written, concise book has really helped to expand my understanding of some of the issues involved. It also opened my eyes to a few new possibilities for performance improvement here at this site. One of which I'll be implementing some time this week- passively caching the "next" and "previous" images in all of my gallery flows. Meaning, if you land on this page, JS will work in the background downloading the images featured on the Next and Previous links. And no, that won't help my YSlow grade, Mr. YSlow junkie (actually there's not much I can do beyond dropping things like Google Analytics and Google Ads), but it will definitely help my users and that's the real point, isn't it?

Any YSLow users out there? If so, can anyone point out a major site with a worse performance grade than either

MSNBC or CNN?. Both scored a wonderful 26!

The number of HTTP requests at CNN is just silly and the overall size is completely out of control:

Empty Cache Primed Cache
18.1K 1 HTML/text
0.0K 5 undefineds
24.1K 13 IFrame/Frames
1.1K 2 XMLHttpRequests
31.0K 2 Flash Objects
326.1K 23 JavaScript Files
520.8K 6 Stylesheet Files
3.2K 45 CSS Images
142.7K 89 Images
1067.4K Total size
186 HTTP requests

MSNB isn't far behind:

195.0K 5 HTML/texts
0.0K 3 undefineds
3.8K 1 IFrame/Frame
66.2K 3 Flash Objects
240.8K 28 JavaScript Files
52.9K 4 Stylesheet Files
21.2K 59 CSS Images
220.2K 81 Images
800.4K Total size
184 HTTP requests

[update]
We now have a new winner. Click through to see who gets an extra fancy 21

I'm reading John Resig's excellent Pro JavaScript Techniques. A great book for any JavaScript programmers in the audience.
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Remember when I redesigned my home page? No? I made some changes based on the guidelines provided by usability.gov. Basically I cut down the amount of prose text and clarified the site choices available.

Well, not quite a month has passed, but I wanted to share the preliminary results with everyone anyway. By the metrics that I was targeting on that page (bounce rate and % of exit) the redesign was a resounding success. Here are the numbers:

So people are spending less time trying to figure out what to do, are less likely to immediately leave (bounce) and are less likely overall to make my home page the last page they visit on the site. I'll take improvements like that any time. Big ups to the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

Once I get my laptop back from HP, I'll be looking to see if I can experiment with a few more nuggets from that excellent resource. I'm definitely eying adjustments to some of the navigation pages around here. I'll be sure to publish the results as I get them.