Disaggregate

 media, syndication, technology, web development  No Responses »
Jul 192010
 

We have done so well with RSS and other aggregators (think FriendFeed) in making it easy to gather up the content we love – making consumption easy and on our terms (and within the software we choose).

But I keep finding areas where this just isn’t easy for those that contribute to the social.  My case in point would be restaurant reviews.  I have a few sites/apps that I use – Yelp, UrbanSpoon and MenuPages – and they all encourage and support reviews.  As I travel and look for feedback on new places to eat I would like to give back and share my experiences.  But in doing so I wind up adding my opinions and content to three different sites, making it difficult for me to step back and learn from that data.  I have to manage three separate accounts and if I want to pull up my favorites I can’t easily do that since they are spread out across the sites.

I can recall Marc Cantor going on about Microformats years ago and they have been widely implemented but this hasn’t prevented what naturally happens in a competitive space, that communities aren’t necessarily connected.  Clearly the technology exists to make sharing possible, but the nature of running a business means that most communities aren’t open.

Now we have several efforts underway through popular sites to make it easier to use the same credentials across numerous sites but this doesn’t fully address that your online identity isn’t portable.  In my example with restaurant reviews and votes I can’t visit one destination and see my library of reviews.  I hope that as the new generation of social sites mature that we go beyond just portable login and get into easily collecting our complete identity’s and contributions.

 Posted by gtyree at 2:27 pm

Forcing Gzip Compression

 technology, web development  No Responses »
Jul 142010
 

I wasn’t able to attend Velocity this year but have been consuming what I can find online and this article from a few days ago from Steve Souders talks about a great approach to handling clients (or more likely proxies and software) that don’t claim to handle Gzip content.

From Andy Martone’s presentation:

  • At the bottom of a page, inject JavaScript to:
    • Check for a cookie.
    • If absent, set a session cookie saying “compression NOT ok”.
    • Write out an iframe element to the page.
  • The browser then makes a request for the iframe contents.
  • The server responds with an HTML document that is always compressed.
  • If the browser understands the compressed response, it executes the inlined JavaScript and sets the session cookie to “compression ok”.
  • On subsequent requests, if the server sees the “compression ok” cookie it can send compressed responses.

The iframe test only runs once so the impact to performance is minimal (and to start the sample size of those getting the test is a small fraction of your traffic).  The upside is that you quickly gain a savings by delivering Gzip payloads to any client that can handle them.  From their testing you might improve the experience for ~15% of your users.

Of course there are still those using seriously old browsers and just can’t handle the compression, but I would say that burdening them with an extra iframe might give them that final reason to upgrade.

via High Performance Web Sites :: Velocity: Forcing Gzip Compression.

 Posted by gtyree at 9:51 am

Recovery.gov using Amazon’s cloud

 everything else, technology  No Responses »
May 182010
 

I am impressed that the government, known for moving none too fast, has moved a production site to the cloud.

It sets a great example and support for these new services and hopefully will be just the first of many cases.  They noted a savings of around $750,000 in the move so clearly a win for everyone that pays taxes too.

White House moves Recovery.gov to Amazon’s cloud – O’Reilly Radar.

 Posted by gtyree at 7:35 pm

Ted on CNN about CNN

 media, technology  No Responses »
May 122010
 

I like this video and that Ted dings CNN a little near the end when he questions whether they are spending time covering Lena Horns death (and no disrespect to Lena) rather than Zimbabwe’s political tensions.

CNN aided in the demise or print

 Posted by gtyree at 9:11 pm  Tagged with:

Google on site performance

 media, technology, web development  No Responses »
May 042010
 

Nice article and video on a few easy things to do to improve the front end performance.  This is something I am enthusiastic about and enjoy squeezing out savings (time rendering, bandwidth, etc.) from a site without impacting its look and feel.

Of course at CNN.com this has been a focus for years, especially the progressive rendering to combat that long homepage.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: You and site performance, sitting in a tree….

 Posted by gtyree at 1:32 pm

Traffic data is key

 family, technology, travel  No Responses »
Feb 122010
 

Traffic data on iPhone mapsA few months ago I headed to FL with the girls for a visit to the Grandparents.  I did a little test to compare the cars GPS with that on the iPhone, both to see if they suggested the same path and to generally see how useful they were.

The big difference of course is traffic data.  Now I know some of the newest in car systems have live traffic data but mine doesn’t and without it I would have wasted a few hours sitting in traffic.  I have one picture from the iPhone to illustrate the value of traffic data.

Without that data I would have sat in that red traffic for at least an hour but probably longer.  I of course never knew what the issue was but with that warning I safely hopped off ahead of the slow down and cruised past it on a parallel highway at around 60mph so I barely lost any time.

So in my case the cars GPS is cool and has its value but the next time I go to buy a car I don’t think I would consider one unless it has live traffic (and maybe weather).  With the iPhone and most any other modern smartphone you have all this in your hand so even if the car can match it I am not sure it would be worth the extra expense.

 Posted by gtyree at 11:35 am
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