Frank Goossens' Twitterless twaddle
Archive for the ‘Technology’ category
Google likes fast! Visitors like fast! So why don’t you go make your site really fast?
Suppose you just bought yourself hosting and you just installed WordPress for blogging or lightweight-CMS-purposes, how can you improve your site’s performance in that case? Easy!
- speed up PHP: use a caching optimizer (I use APC) to significantly speed up PHP performance (don’t bother signing up for shared hosting with a company that doesn’t offer PHP with acceleration).
- cache dynamic output: install the “WP Super Cache” WordPress plugin. Configure and then forget about it; if you create/edit a blogpost, impacted pages are automatically removed from cache.
- optimize CSS and JS: install the “CSS JS booster” WordPress plugin, which (amongst other things) grabs all CSS and JS from WordPress and Plugins and outputs it in one CSS- and one JS-file (some plugins, e.g. Sociable and WordPress Mobile Pack, might need tweaking of the css media-attribute though)
- avoid calling 3rd party javascript: tracking (e.g. Google Analytics, which I removed), widgets (e.g. Twitter badges) or other 3rd party gadgets (e.g. AddToAny, which I removed) can slow down your site’s performance significantly
- optimize images: fire up your favorite photo editor and make that image just a bit smaller, use an acceptable level of compression (I end up between 70 and 80% for JPEG’s, depending on the image) and upload to smushit.com to squeeze out the last optimization-drop (example; I used a 20KB picture from Flickr, resized it to 80%, saved it with 77% compression and smushed it to end up with a mere 6KB).
The impact of a number of these steps can be measured easily; below are the response times of my blog’s homepage (the html including css, js and images) as measured by Pingdom Tool’s Full Page Test.
- default Wordpress (on a Linux VPS with 320Mb RAM memory): 6.5 seconds
- (1) with PHP APC activated: 4.1 seconds
- (2) with WP Super Cache: 3.1 seconds
- (3) with CSS JS Booster: 1.3 seconds
So there you have it, from 6.5 to 1.3 seconds in only 5 easy steps! WordPress specific, but easily applicable to other platforms as well. Now go and make your site fast! And then go and make it even faster!
A short followup on my previous post about iframes; as I happen to like simple drop-in solutions, I updated the javascript that handles the ‘blank 2nd page in an iframe bug’ to automagically work upon inclusion in the html.
So if you happen to have problems with the positioning of 2nd (or later) pages in iframes (due to the top part of the iframe not being visible in the ‘viewport’), just upload frameMagic.js to your webserver and add the following to the head of your html to ease your iframe-blues;
<script type="text/javascript" src="path/to/frameMagic.js"></script>
Optionally you can specify which iframes are to be treated this way (excluding the other ones) by doing
<script type="text/javascript">
var fM_conf="iFrame1,iFrame3";
</script>
You can find more information and examples on http://futtta.be/frameMagic.
Iframes have always been frowned upon by web-purists (confession: myself included). But things are never black and white and sometimes iframes can be the best solution for a problem (you could substitute “‘iframes” with “Flash” in the previous 2 sentences, but that’s another discussion). So here are 5 quick tips which might lessen some of the SEO- and usability-problems associated with the use of iframes;
1. Google loves doesn’t hate iframes done right!
Although Google is rather vague about the subject, iframes and SEO do not have to be mutually exclusive. But you will have to make sure it’s your main page that shines in search results, not the iframe-content. The main page (where the iframes are defined) has to be more then a mere placeholder for one or more iframes. Migrate as much information (titles, description and other text) from the iframe-content to your main page, which should describe what goes on in the iframe(s). Use the iframe title-property and insert alternative content between opening and closing iframe-tags. A quick example:
<h2>Calculate your mortgage rate</h2>
<p>Calculating your mortgage rate was never easier; just enter the loan-amount and the duration below!</p>
<iframe src=”http://page.url/iframe-container-page1″ … title=”Calculate your mortgage rate here”>Your browser does not seem to handle frames properly, but you can calculate your mortgage rate <a href=”http://page.url/iframe-container-page1″>here</a></iframe>
2. Own the stage
Avoid visitors viewing the iframe-content out of the context of the main page (e.g. because they followed a link in search-results). Add javascript to the iframe-content to check if it is accessed stand-alone and redirect to the main page (or explain and provide link to the main page) if that is the case.
if(self.location==top.location) top.location.replace('http://contain.er/page-url/here');
3. Don’t draw blanks
When a visitor clicks a link at the bottom of a long page inside an iframe and the target is a shorter page inside the same iframe, then he/she will see a blank page which is … well not very usable, no? The (hackety-hack) solution; tell the browser to scroll to the top of the iframe each time a new page in it is loaded, by calling the function below (with the iframe id as parameter) when the iframe’s onLoad event fires:
<script>
var firstrun = new Object();
function frameMagic(el) {
if (typeof firstrun[el] === ‘undefined’) { firstrun[el]=true; }
else { document.getElementById(el).scrollIntoView(); }
}
</script>
<iframe id=”iframe” onLoad=”frameMagic(‘iframe’);”>
4. Your users really do need scrolling=”auto”!
Help your visitors access all iframe content no matter what configuration they’re using: don’t disable the iframe scrollbars! Disabling them will render the iframe partially inaccessible for some of your users, because the size your iframe-content needs depends on things outside your control such as operating system & versions (e.g. font & screen resolution), browser (e.g. css-implementation) and browser configuration (e.g. non-default font-size). Instead define a reasonable iframe-width and height, make the iframe-content width flexible (fluid) and let the browser decide if a vertical scrollbar is needed.
5. Smart sizing without scrollbars
If you really really really don’t want scrollbars, if you want your iframe to adapt to the size needed by the iframe-content automatically and if you’re not afraid to experiment; there are some nifty javascript-solutions that allow the iframe-content to communicate the required height to the main page. Check out Framemanager (stand-alone, has some issues though) and the JQuery-postmessage iframe-example (which does everything in javascript, which isn’t really ideal from an accessibility point of view).
Conclusion: iframes aren’t necessarily evil (either), but you’ll have to make a small effort to render them somewhat SEO- and user-friendly.
Being “the computer guy” in the family might be a pain in the ass sometimes, but trying to help out users that are not tech savvy can be very revealing. Yesterday my father-in-law asked me to take a look at his computer, there was something about the browser that was not right. Turned out he let Google lure him into downloading Chrome and making it the default browser. What bothered him most about Chrome was the lack of menu’s (file|edit|…|help), while a lot of the us (the in-crowd) consider the minimal use of chrome a plus. Usability is not only about clean, simple UI’s, but also about not breaking novice users’ expectations of how your application looks and behaves.
Anyway, I showed him IE8 and Firefox 3.5 (both were installed as well) and he recognized Firefox as the browser he was most familiar with. So I uninstalled Chrome, hid IE8, upgraded him to FF 3.6 and also installed the “Vacuum Places improved” and NoScript add-ons.
“Vacuum Places improved” cleans up the places sqlite database where Firefox stores bookmarks and history and which can become very big over time. When tweaking the options (“hide icon” and “auto-vacuum every 20 browser starts”) it was a great way to invisibly tune browser performance, but it turns out Firefox 3.6 vacuums places.sqlite automatically (when idle, every 1 to 2 months). So Pierre, if you ever read this; remind me to uninstall “Vacuum Places improved” next time! 
NoScript is a whole other beast; it is a add-on for the security-conscious tech-head, which by default disables javascript, flash, java, … It’s a great add-on, but it is very disruptive and as such totally unfit for novice users. Unless you change the configuration off course, because modifying these options makes NoScript a must-have addon for both you and your grandma;
- General: check “Scripts Globally Allowed (dangerous)”
- Embeddings: uncheck the 8 “Forbid” options, check both “untrusted” and “trusted” for Clearclick protection
- Appearance: uncheck “Status bar icon”, “Status bar label” and “Contextual menu”
- Advanced/XSS: check “Sanitize cross-site suspicious requests”
Although the first option specifically claims it is dangerous to do so, these changes render NoScript into an add-on that provides a lot of extra security (protecting against clickjacking, cross-site scripting and implementing support for x-frame-options and Strict Transport Security) without bothering users with new UI-elements containing incomprehensible questions, messages or options.
Because web security is not only about protecting against threats, but also about not breaking novice users’ expectations of how your secured browser (and the web) looks and behaves.
After discovering AddToAny secretly enrolls all of my blogs visitors in a behavioral marketing platform, I disabled the plugin and mailed the author for more information. He answered the media6degrees-integration was a partner-test, only providing them with non-personally identifiable data, which the company indeed can use for targeted advertising. But the good news was that AddToAny would also offer a “publisher opt-out mechanism” shortly. And indeed, last week, Pat announced the brand new a2a api and mailed me the following opt-out code;
var a2a_config = a2a_config || {};
a2a_config.no_3p = 1;
These two lines of javascript, which have to be placed in front of the http://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js script-include, should disable all current and future 3rd party tracking. I hope the web-guys from e.g. deredactie.be and standaard.be (and there are many others) implement this as soon as possible!
So now we can opt-out from having our visitors being spied upon by media6degrees, what more could one want? Well, since you’re asking, here’s a small list of things AddToAny could really should do;
- transparency; tell users that their visitors’ information will be shared with 3rd parties (in all relevant places)
- documentation: show them how to “remove the spy” on the AddToAny api page (“no_3p” isn’t there)
- ease-of-use: allow the tracking to be disabled with a simple checkbox in the WordPress and Drupal plugins
The opt-out code is a important first step and I’m sure concerns such as those voiced on the WordPress-forums will help AddToAny to further make the right decisions!
PPK of Quirksmode-fame it at it again, this time badmouthing iPhone-centric web development. A lot of people seem to take issue with his point of view, but aside from the (typically Dutch?) in-your-face bluntness, I do think he makes some very valid points. The web is about broad accessibility, about allowing as many people as possible to access your information/ application and the same should indeed be the case for mobile web development.
Sexy as a iPhone-UI mimicking webapp (based on e.g. iUI or JQTouch) might seem, it does have a number of important shortcomings:
- it is sub-optimal for the web, even on iPhones, as the context is very different (e.g. in terms of responsiveness)
- the iPhone-UI-approach does not make a lot of sense on non-iPhone high-end touch devices
- it will probably not work on mid- and lower-end phones at all
So yes, web-developers should try to build mobile sites that render on as many devices/ browsers possible, as we do on the non-mobile web. Unless you’re willing to invest in several sites for different handsets, building for one specific device is a bad choice, however good the browser might be (and Safari Mobile indeed is great).
That’s why I decided to switch from the iPhone-centric WPTouch (which I installed only 3 months ago) to “WordPress Mobile Pack” for this blog. WMP offers great mobile functionality out of the box;
It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about.
When running the MobiReady test to assess how “mobile-ready” my blog is, I get a great score of 4.35/5 (page size being the main remaining issue). So thanks for ranting PPK!
With all the discussions about the place of Flash on the ever-evolving web and the excitement following Google’s announcement about YouTube going HTML5, one would almost forget that YouTube is only at the very start of their “open video” endeavor. The limitations of the current implementations are numerous; there’s no OGG (damn), no ads (yeah!) and no embedding either (damn) for example.
After looking into ways to call the YouTube mp4-file from within a Video for Everybody html-block (which is not possible, Google protects raw video-files using what seems to be a session-based hash that has to be provided in the URL), I decided to take another (dirty) approach; faking it!
The solution is entirely javascript-based and is as un-elegant as it is simple; create a html-file with a script include of http://futtta.be/newTube/newTube.js and a div with “id=newTube” containing a link to a YouTube-page and the script automagically takes care of the rest. Check out http://futtta.be/newTube/ to see it in action.
The result is an embedded YouTube player which will display the HTML5-version if you’re running a browser which supports mp4/h264 playback (i.e. a recent version of Chrome or Safari) and if you enrolled in the beta. If either of these preconditions aren’t met, you’ll just see the plain old Flash-player.
Don’t get your hopes up, in reality newTube is probably pretty useless (for reasons I’ll get into in a follow-up post, when I have some time to spare that is). You’ll have to wait for someone (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, … are you listening?) to offer real embeddable html5-video (with support for both mp4/h264 and and ogg/theora).
But I did have fun creating the very first html5-capable embedded YouTube-player 
