Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles on JavaScript performance, use of Node.js, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more.

Read more

Do you have an itch when it comes to how your web browser works? Perhaps there’s some functionality you want from the browser that it doesn’t support, or it does something in a particular way that drives you nuts.

Chances are there is an extension to remedy that situation.

We have gone over most of the extensions available for Apple’s Safari web browser and come up with recommendations for 15 extensions that we think you should try.

You find all the extensions on Apple’s Safari Extension Gallery. We can’t link to each individual extension, unfortunately, because the way Apple has built the site, so you have to go to the gallery and click your way to the extension you want.

Read more

Over the past year, web pages have on average become 25% bigger. We’re not talking about dimensions here, but download size. Based on the top 1,000 websites on the Internet, the average page size has gone from 626 kB to 784 kB.

A 25% size increase in just one year is rather drastic. With that kind of growth, the average web page will be 980 kB in just a year (amost 1 MB!). In five years, a page will be almost 2.4 MB. And that’s just an average, many pages will be significantly larger.

What is behind this exploding growth? Let’s find out.

Read more

If you’re using jQuery, a good thing you can do is to use the jQuery file hosted on one of the three public content delivery networks (CDNs) provided by Google, Microsoft and Edgecast (via MediaTemple).

This has several benefits:

• You offload your own servers.
• You increase the odds that the file is cached, since other sites will be linking to the same file.
• A CDN will probably deliver the file faster than you can.

So which of these free CDN options will give you the best performance?

Read more

Five years ago, no one had heard about jQuery. It was just an idea in the back of Javascript guru John Resig’s head. Today, jQuery is by far the most popular Javascript library in the world and is used by over 28% of all websites on the internet.

jQuery is open source, web developers love it, it’s been embraced by a slew of big companies, and is close to becoming a de facto standard for website development. It doesn’t just have the support of the open source developer community behind it, it’s even received official support from Microsoft.

Read more

Next year is going to be a big year for web browsers. In 2010, we’ll hopefully see Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9, Safari 5, and possibly even Chrome 5. This new batch of browsers will include several new features that have the potential to entirely change the way we interact with the Web.

Read more

We have performed a survey of the top 10,000 websites on the Internet to find out not just how many of them are using Google Analytics, but also the division between the legacy urchin.js script and the new ga.js script.

We found out two very interesting things.

Read more

Considering the massive amount of websites that are using Google Analytics it is of course extremely important that the Google Analytics script is always available and responding well so that website visitors will have no problems loading it.

We use Google Analytics ourselves here at Pingdom and think it’s a great tool for keeping track of our visitor traffic. Since we have included the GA script on both our main website and our blog, we were curious to see how well it performs and how reliable it is (uptime wise).

Read more

Aside from uptime, website performance is something we talk a lot about here at Pingdom. There are lots of ways to improve the speed of your website, but this post will focus on ways to optimize the size and number of files your website uses, both being important factors affecting the load time.

The files we are talking about are of course the files that are delivered to a visitor when they load your website, such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and most important in this case, images.

Since images usually make up most of the size of a website, we will focus the majority of this article on image optimization.

Read more