OptimizationTag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Levels of Impossibility

As a novice web developer I often thought that many site functionality ideas were impossible. Without experience or working knowledge of a variety of web languages even the most basic Javascript animations or ajax features throughout the internet lived in the realm of dark magic and mystery. Now, after years of developing web sites for clients, I understand much more of how things work, or at least how to duplicate it using more familiar technologies. When a client throws a unexpected feature request at me, I can normally figure out a way to add it into their project. However, I still believe that some things are 'impossible'... it's just a matter of how impossible they are.

Level 1: Truly, Undeniably Impossible

Even with all of the amazing things web developers can do these days we still have one solid restriction: the browser. A browser instance cannot affect other browser instance (unless they are linked). One domain cannot directly read another domain's cookies. Web sites cannot affect a user's computer unless the user allows it. ...

• Tags:
• best practice
• optimization

Using Headers for Caching

One of my main goals while redoing my website is to optimize my content, both on the frontend and backend. The frontend is something that I've always considered to be the most important in terms of a fast user experience - I'm not crunching enough data on the backend to worry about long processing delays for users. However, depending on the connection, I've noticed delays upwards of five seconds in between pages, which is completely unacceptable.

There's a few things that a web developer can do to speed up the frontend. Decreasing the number and lowering the size of the unique elements are two of the most obvious. If the user only has to download two small stylesheets instead of five, your site will appear faster. What I wanted to do was take this a step further; repeat visitors will not have to download any new stylesheets, scripts, or images. The only http request will be the xHTML content. This can be handled by using the built in caching components of the internet.

There are several different ways that website can cache information ...

• Tags:
• http headers
• my site
• optimization