Sam’s random musings

Automatically Version Your CSS and JavaScript Files

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Because we’re always on the look out for ways to speed up our web application, one of my favorite tools for optimization is the YSlow Firefox extension. Based on rules created by research done by Yahoo engineer, Steve Souders (his book High Performance Web Sites is a must read for anyone interested in front end engineering), the tool hooks into Firebug and helps you diagnose issues that can shave seconds off your pages’ load times. While we were able to implement most of the suggestions fairly easily, Rule #3, which specifies adding a far futures Expires header required a bit of elbow grease that some of you might be interested in.

There are some good tricks in here, but sometimes I think that designers and developers really get into the ‘optimization phase’ way to early. There are so many sites to my mind that really could use some more time spent in who are they being built for, how are they being used and what can I do to make the experience more streamlined and useful.

Recently I noticed that the Bank of Americas around my house started replacing the ATM machines, and there seems to of been a lot done to make the experience much faster, not the machines being faster but the experience. And it really makes a difference….

(Via Particletree RSS Digest.)