Disqus - Latest Comments for spierzchala

Re: Baseline Testing With cURL

spierzchala — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:16:24 -0000

Thanks for that Ethan. It's been a few years since I looked at the article and I've moved DBs a few times, so the slashes probably got stripped by some transfer mechanism along the way.

I will update the post now.

smp

Re: Effective Web Performance: The Wrong 80%

spierzchala — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:16:43 -0000

Having looked at the Aptimize Web site (I unfortunately was not able to attend Velocity this year), it seems to do many of the things in a single package that Steve Souders recommends sites do to improve measured performance.

However, as the above post notes, Aptimize is simply another in a long line of tools designed to fix the technical problem of poor Web performance.

If Web performance is being examined after a site has been released, the question of how the site got out the door in the first place becomes even more important.

Re: The Adobe and Omniture Acquisition: Some Predictions

spierzchala — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:40:37 -0000

Hate to say this, but when the fox watches the henhouse, who will you believe when chickens go missing?

Agreed that Flash and Streaming tagging makes great sense for getting deep into user behavior. But in every case when a metrics or measurement vendor gets acquired, the question of 'How will this affect the independence of the results?' needs to be asked.

If Adobiture declares that Flash is the only supported standard, this will provide a great opportunity for vendors who support other streaming and rich-media development environments, such as Silverlight.

In effect, Adobe is limiting the scope of data that Omniture will be allowed to support. Unless there is a strong independent leader in the Omniture business unit, they risk becoming that analytics thing that Adobe let's us put in Flash.

Re: Gutter Helmet: A new start?

spierzchala — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:27:39 -0000

Jury's still out with us. After a botched install, we are waiting to see how Gutter Helmet does this fall and winter.

We lost a set of back stairs to ice and snow after poor installation. Gutter Helmet is installed by franchisees, so your mileage may vary. Ask around and see what other people's experience has been.

Re: T-Mobile Dash 3G: Continuing Impressions

spierzchala — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:33:56 -0000

Roni:

Been a few weeks, but if I remember, I downloaded using IE on the Dash 3G directly from skype.com, and it was auto-installed from that point. I suggest giving that a try, as it was seamless enough that I don't remember the process (which is more than I can say for the failed installs of Opera Mini).

smp

Re: T-Mobile Dash 3G: Continuing Impressions

spierzchala — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:41:06 -0000

I got skype to install without difficulty and have done a very limited amount of testing with it, mainly because I have a unlimited calling plan for the US.

From everything I saw, it worked well. I can't think of any gotchas that might cause problems, but you may want to enable your WiFi (if it isn't) before installing.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/socialtoo-status-lets-you-update.html

spierzchala — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:55:21 -0000

I update Facebook, Twitter, etc. through Ping.fm using SMS or email from my clunky WinMo 6.1 phone. No third-party app there.

While I'm offline. In my car. Anywhere.

Just sayin'...

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/socialtoo-status-lets-you-update.html

spierzchala — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:56:45 -0000

<sigh>

Ummm, Ping.fm has been around awhile now. Does this. And more.

</sigh>

Re: Effective Web Performance

spierzchala — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:29:20 -0000

The breakdown that I encounter tends to be heavily weighted towards synthetic measurements, but that may be because I work for a firm that still has a heavy emphasis on this method of data-gathering.

Also, synthetic performance measurements are often seen or portrayed as less intrusive and invasive than the other methods. That does not take away from the effectiveness of usefulness of the data that is gathered from Browser-side and Server-side passive data collection.

An effective Web performance strategy requires a holistic view of the site and a realization that one technology alone won't be enough to provide a clear perspective of the site's performance from a business, operations or customer perspective.

Re: Google Chrome: One thing we do know… (HTTP Pipelining)

spierzchala — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:29:18 -0000

Cool. Now, if it's not supported by anyone, it should get pulled from the RFC. And now that the browser engines are almost all abstracted from the browser that wraps around them, maybe it's time to look at what works to make browsers and content delivery faster.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/personal-heresy-what-os-you-use-is-no.html

spierzchala — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:22:19 -0000

What it comes down to is that the OS is not the issue anymore. And as browsers evolve and adapt to the technology that is being used on sites, the browser is no longer the issue (except for Internet Explorer). I discussed this when I asked if the browser mattered anymore (http://bit.ly/13dAKG), and the same can be asked about operating systems.

I easily switch between XP, Win7, Mac OS X and Linux. As long as I see a browser icon, I can work.

You have finally reached the conclusion that scares commercial operating system makers - the underlying operating system is becoming less and less relevant.

Re: Browser Wars: The Slow Rise of Internet Explorer 8

spierzchala — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:09:08 -0000

Found the problem - it wasn't the theme, it was a rogue plugin that was borking the HTML. Likely a tag that wasn't being properly closed.

<sigh>

smp

Re: Browser Wars: The Slow Rise of Internet Explorer 8

spierzchala — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:38:09 -0000

Ugh.

Time to find a browser compatible Wordpress theme.

smp

Re: Browser Wars: Internet Explorer 8.0 Released on Windows Update

spierzchala — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:24:16 -0000

Microsoft claims that there are fewer bugs and irregularities in the handling of standards with Internet Explorer 8. That said, I would recommend running the browsers through the ACID2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2) and ACID3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3) CSS tests.

smp

Re: Does the browser really matter?

spierzchala — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:10:30 -0000

Quite right, Mr. Unger. That is exactly the point that I am saying.

If the Browser doesn't matter, and most applications are run over the web, then does it matter what operating system you use? Or if you use a traditional operating system at all?

It's just as likely in the future that the primary device will be a phone/computer hybrid that is dockable and portable. As long as the apps are available and seamlessly integrate no matter what the platform is, then the operating system will go the way of the browser.

Interesting, but irrelevant.

Re: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

spierzchala — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:21:43 -0000

1. Any browser that doesn't support GZIP encoding doesn't send the 'Accept-encoding: gzip[,deflate]' header. This flags the server to sent your text files in all their brutal honesty.

2. If anyone is running a browser that is lower than IE 6.0, they have bigger issues than worrying about compression. Every browser released since 2001 handles HTTP compression flawlessly (except for the IE 6 JS issue, which is just insane and conditional responses will deal with that).

3. Measure your performance FROM THE CLIENT SIDE with and without compression. Server-side processing time is important, but how long does it take to send the file along the wire to its destination.

You can even compress content in many shared hosting Wordpress environments by placing the '<?php ob_gzhandler(); ?>' command at the very top of the header.php file.

Good luck and happy compressing.

smp
http://newestindustry.org/category/webperforman...

Re: On the persistence of family - William A Kinnear

spierzchala — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:29:45 -0000

David:

Thank you. He will be greatly missed by all of us.

smp

Re: Hit Tracking with PHP and MySQL

spierzchala — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:23:44 -0000

This is definitely a solution for a small web site, and was designed to be small and light.

I started using this more when I was hosting my blog outside of the tracking infrastructure, so there is no increase in traffic on either infrastructure.

Steps could also be taken to aggregate the data based on patterns in the data and then archive the raw results outside the DB.

Many ways this can be improved upon. But it gets folks thinking.

Re: Compressing Web Output Using mod_gzip for Apache 1.3.x and 2.0.x

spierzchala — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:35:11 -0000

This is not good. It sounds as though you have your docs already compressed using GZIP. mod_deflate is designed to do this on the fly as content is generated.

When HTML content is compressed using mod_deflate, it should maintain the text/html MIM-type.

smp

Re: Hit Tracking with PHP and MySQL

spierzchala — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:47:17 -0000

Using ip2long is a holdover from my Geographic IP Database, where performing IP searches was far easier with a numeric value than an IP address. Most application development languages have a way to convert these numbers back to IPs quickly. As well, this conversion can occur natively in MySQL SELECT statements.

You could add a column to the database table that added the raw IP address with very little change to the method described in this article.

Re: Twitter to cost Canadians 15 cents a tweet

spierzchala — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:46:14 -0000

<sigh>

Yet another reason to stay in the US.

Re: Compressing PHP Output

spierzchala — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:05:23 -0000

It shouldn't affect you performance to any great degree as it is used in many production environments currently.

However, if you do have the ability to do compression inside of the Web server itself (Apache, IIS, etc.), I would recommend that over adding compression at the application layer.

smp

Re: Bacon! I smell Bacon!

spierzchala — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:50:45 -0000

"So once I'd fueled myself up on coffee and Bart's baco-cinders-nothing beats an all-black breakfast-and read all the comics, I threw one leg over my battle-scarred all-terrain stump-jumper and rode several miles to work."

Neal Stephenson
Zodiac

Re: Geographic IP database using PERL, PHP and MySQL

spierzchala — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:11:08 -0000

Unfortunately, all the data does exist, but it is in the whois data for the blocks in question. This is a manual process that I chose not to undertake due to its complexity and my lack of programming skils.

Re: Geographic IP database using PERL, PHP and MySQL

spierzchala — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:34:54 -0000

Jakob:

From just the registrar data, you will unlikely be able to do this. However, there are a number of commercial products that may be able to assist you in narrowing these down.

smp