• IE 8 Charset Bug

    Earlier today I was playing around with a performance test case when I noticed that stylesheets and scripts were being requested twice in IE8. Eventually I figured out that the problem had to do with how the character set was specified. This is how things seem to work: In IE8, pages that rely on the […]

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  • iPad View Source Bookmarklet

    For a few years I’ve been using this little bookmarklet, written by Abe Fettig, on my iPhone to view page source in Mobile Safari. It works well, but unfortunately the output is not optimized for viewing on the iPhone. Because I use the bookmarklet so infrequently, it’s never really bothered me. Then I installed the […]

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  • iPad HTTP Debugging with Charles

    After noticing that the caching in iPad Safari seemed a little funky, I made an effort to decipher some of the logic used by the browser cache. I didn’t get very far, but in the process I figured out how to route my iPad HTTP traffic through a web debugger on my laptop. It turns […]

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  • Cleaning Up Ad Server Scripts

    If you work on sites with ads you know that few things can muck up your efforts to improve a site’s performance like an ad server–3rd party ad tags, iFrames, lots of document.write, and almost all of it out of your control. In his P3PC series, Steve Souders is currently analyzing the performance of popular […]

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  • Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain

    Serving static content from a cookieless domain is a standard performance best practice, one you’ve surely encountered if you’ve used a performance analysis tool like YSlow or Page Speed.  The concept is simple—don’t serve static content like images and stylesheets from a domain that sets cookies—but exactly how to achieve this might not be clear […]

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  • How to Install Nginx on WebFaction

    As a precursor to a few posts about Nginx I thought I would outline the steps required to install your own instance of Nginx on WebFaction. WebFaction’s servers include an installation of Nginx that you use whenever you create a “static only” or “symlink to static only” app, and for many things this is all […]

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  • How to Install Radiant CMS on WebFaction

    WebFaction recently added a one-click installer for a Ruby/Rails/Nginx/Passenger stack. I tried it out last week, attempting to install the Rails-based CMS Radiant, but being fairly new to Rails I ran into a number of obstacles. Most of the problems I encountered involved mysterious version conflicts between dependencies and gems existing in multiple locations. It […]

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  • WebFaction Web Host Review

    A few months ago I made the decision to upgrade from my run-of-the-mill, cheap shared hosting account to something that felt a little more serious.  Initially I had planned to move to Media Temple’s Grid service but further research turned up an overwhelming number of bad reviews and seemingly legitimate complaints. So then I decided […]

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