Indika’s Web Log

Google has launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.

Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you’ll find how fast your pages load, how they’ve fared over time, how your site’s load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.

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Yahoo released a “final notice” on Wednesday reminding GeoCities users that the free site creation service will be closing up shop later this month.

Yahoo is closing its GeoCities personal home page service, and with it will go an era of self-expression on the Web that’s largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.

GeoCities rose to power during an era when publishing on the Internet meant setting up your own Web site. GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML, the language that describes Web pages.

“On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and file,” Yahoo wrote in a statement to GeoCities users.

The company said any GeoCities user that wants to maintain the site will be able to port it to Yahoo’s Web Hosting service, which would cost $4.99 per month for a year and $9.95 per month afterward. GeoCities Plus customers can port their sites to Yahoo Web Hosting at no additional charge.

Yahoo first announced that it would be closing GeoCities in April. At the time, the company didn’t divulge when the service would finally close.

Yahoo wrote on its GeoCities Help page that its decision to close the site was rooted in its desire to help its “customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”

GeoCities’ closure marks an end of an era for the Web. The free site-building service, which Yahoo bought in 1999 for $2.9 billion, was a precursor to many of the self-publishing and social-media tools Web users employ today.

As someone who used GeoCities to create his first personal site, I find it a bit sad to say good-bye. That said, it’s about time.

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Google is now giving webmasters the ability to prompt users for automatic translations of their pages. With the new website translator gadget, site owners can paste a short snippet of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages.

The gadget will automatically detect a user’s preferred language, and if that user’s language settings differ from the content on the gadget-enabled website, a frame will appear over the web page, prompting the user to click a button for instant translation of all text content.

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Think you can make a better fast-booting, Chrome-focused OS than Google? Want to craft a custom Linux system that boots from a USB stick? SUSE Studio gives you 15 GB to do exactly that, and you do it all online.SUSE Studio is what powered the fan-made “Chrome OS” we posted yesterday, which, in that case, was a semi-stripped-down system loaded with the developers’ version of Chrome, Google webapp links, and OpenOffice. If speed and cloud computing aren’t your bag, you can create a fully functional system with Firefox, 3D graphics, and whatever apps you can find installed. Want your system to start up with an AWN dock and Launchy keystroke launcher running? Not a problem.Even if you don’t know all that much about Linux, it’s pretty easy to build a system you can boot from a USB stick or live CD/DVD, run inside a virtual machine program, or actually install it—or, heck, even test it out in your web browser.

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Regular expressions are a very useful tool for developers. They allow to find, identify or replace text, words or any kind of characters. In this article, I have compiled 15+ extremely useful regular expressions that any web developer should have in his toolkit.

 Topics Covered

• Regular expressions syntax
• PHP regular expression functions
• Validate domain name
• Enlight a word from a text
• Enlight search results in your WordPress blog
• Get all images from a HTML document
• Remove repeated words (case insensitive)
• Remove repeated punctuation
• Matching a XML/HTML tag
• Matching an XHTML/XML tag with a certain attribute value
• Matching hexadecimal color values
• Find page title
• Parsing Apache logs
• Replacing double quotes by smart qutotes
• Checking password complexity
• WordPress: Using regexp to retrieve images from post
• Generating automatic smileys

Here is the complete article

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Cheat sheets and reference guides are useful for both beginners and advanced web professionals.

They can be used to help you remember syntax or as a tool to aid in memorization.In this post, we aim to cover the reference guides for all of the most commonly used platforms, software and coding languages.

In this web article you’ll find a compilation of the 30 most useful and well-organized cheat sheets, checklists and reference guides.

This is a Great resource for all of us. Here is the Article

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For all you frustrated web designers out there who are constantly testing and retesting to make sure your site looks perfect across browsers then you know there are lots of options out there for testing. The Launch of Browserlabs from Adobe has prompted Bryon to put together a list of 10 browser testing tools for web designers. 

Adobe Browserlabs launched today making it faster and easier to browser test your client sites. Here are 10 browser testing tools and services for web designers.

Here is the entire article from the original source.

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PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby.

Just came across the 50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools posted at Smashing Magazine which immediately caught my attention. It lists all the great tools around PHP which makes it more easier and fun to code.

PHP is faster (updated), and it is the most used scripting language in practice; it has detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frameworks; and most importantly, it’s much easier to get started with PHP than with other scripting languages (Python, for example). That’s why it makes perfect sense to provide the huge community of PHP developers with an overview of useful tools and resources that can make their development process easier and more effective.

This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow. Among other things, you’ll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP.

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Yahoo released a great tool to optimize the images. And it’s named smushit. Smushit increase web performance easily. Optimizing images by hand is time consuming and painful. Smush it does it for you. It has 3 modes of operation.

1. You can give it the image URL and it will optimize (smush it) and give you the image and the result savings.

2. Upload your image and it will do its trick.

3. Install a browser plug-in. So while you are in a web page you click this icon and smush it will analyze all the images in that page and give you the smushed results. If you have firebug installed the smushit icon will be right next to it.  The smush it browser plug-in currently works in Firefox only.

Smush it will also convert GIFs to PNGs for better optimization. It’s simply great and easy and has made my life much easier. Thanks to Yahoo team.

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Javascript is and has been the best client side scripting language so far.  I increases the usability and reduce the server resource usage when used wisely. Ajax is a technology built around Javascript and that alone has greatly advanced the web based applications.

 eg. Sites : 123Surveys | LoversArea | MathChimp | TrulyGay | TLDSpy

Though we can code in pure javascript there are some Javascript frameworks that ease the development. Thease are;

Prototype

Prototype is one of the earlier Javascript frameworks and is also included in the Ruby on Rails framework. It aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

eg. Sites : CNN | The New York Times | Digg | Apple | Veoh.com | TypePad | Fox News Channel | Finetune | iLike | Last.fm | Twitter | Hakia | YouSendIt

JQuery

JQuery is a framework that has received a lot of attention due to its speed, size and smart modular approach which has led to a big library of plugins. jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

eg. Sites : Digg | BBC | Major League Baseball | Dell | IsoHunt | Break.com | TinyPic | FixMyMovie | eMusic | Kayak |Box.net

MooTools

Just like other Javascript frameworks, MooTools contains several functions to help development. One of the more known ones is its advanced effects component.  MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API. MooTools code respects strict standards and doesn’t throw any warnings. It’s extensively documented and has meaningful variable names: a joy to browse and a snap to understand.

 eg. Sites : Mint | Worth1000 | Bebo | Vimeo

Yahoo! UI Library (YUI)

Yahoo has developed its own Javascript framework. They use it for their own websites, but have also made it freely available to others. This user Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

eg. Sites : Yahoo! Shopping | Zillow | Bebo | YouSendIt | ImageShack | LinkedIn | Walmart.com

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