Chris.Weekly.org - A Web Space

It’s been a whirlwind first month-plus in my new job at Yottaa as I’ve had (and still have) so much to learn, but it’s all very good. The people are fantastic, the technology is amazing, and I’m really fired up about the whole thing. Yottaa is all about web performance optimization, and WPO is something that has fascinated me for the last couple years.

One of the things I’ve started doing is writing at http://blog.yottaa.com. My first post earlier this month was a how-to guide for creating filters and segments in Google Analytics, to prevent smart bots like ours from polluting web analytics. It’s not anything ground-breaking, just a simple explanation with step-by-step instructions and screenshots, but it felt good to help the site owner community at large with a common problem.

Then last week I wrote about the W3C Nav Timing API, which finally makes it possible for scripts in a page to access information about some very important aspects of page load performance (like DNS resolution and server processing times). Again, not rocket science, but it was timely (the spec was promoted to a recommendation candidate two days before my post) and coincided with the release of IE9 and FF4.

I’ll be writing regularly, probably once or twice a month, and though at first I feared it’d be a distraction from my “real” responsibilities (driving the product), I’m finding I actually enjoy it. I’ve never really spent any time cultivating my identity online, and I think blogging on web performance topics is a good way to correct that. Killing two pigs with one bird (or something like that).

Anyway you can find my posts about web performance optimization here. Enjoy!

Today was my last day at Upromise, after more than a decade working there in various roles. I wrote this to those I’m leaving behind, but I thought I’d share it with a broader audience:

So long, everyone. Today is the end of my time at Upromise.
It’s been a long, strange trip — and a wonderful ride. Ten years gone, more than a quarter of my life, and I’d do it again.

When I started back in October 2000, there were no members, no website, no revenue, just a big idea and a lot of enthusiasm.
None of this has gone how I expected, but having been a developer, principal engineer, manager and architect I’ve had the privilege to work with some incredibly talented people and to build something that has in some way impacted the lives of millions of people. We may not have fundamentally changed the affordability of college as we’d set out to do, but by reaching so high we did do some great, great things. Maybe that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned in my time here: in reaching for unattainable goals, it’s possible to succeed along the way even though you never get there. May you all reach for things beyond your grasp, and in so doing, grow.

I’m looking forward to keeping in touch via linkedin and twitter, and I hope and expect my path will cross with many of yours again.
Thank you, sincerely, for everything.

Warm Regards,
Chris Weekly
Former Sr. Web Applications Architect, Upromise

I’ve been posting on twitter and ignoring my blog for some time now. In the meantime Disqus-generated comment spam has been annoying me. So, I’m disabling comments for now. If and when I start to really manage this blog properly I’ll probably turn them back on. Till then I’m easy to contact if you have something to say.

http://twitter.com/cew3 for personal stuff

http://twitter.com/cweekly for more tech / professional stuff

Have a nice day.

A useful web-tier debugging technique is to take a snapshot of a given page (i.e., saving the HTML and Javascript and CSS and images locally, serving them up w/ your local webserver) as this facilitates very rapid test and iterate cycles. However, properly saving the full set of files is something at which vanilla Firefox, well, sucks. Enter the “Save Complete Page As” add-on. Its dependency checking is much more robust, and the local snapshot you download is much much more likely to look and behave the same as the real thing.

For example for the Upromise visitor home page, the built-in FF “Save Page As” option resulted in an ugly, incomplete mess consisting of 20 files. The add-on “Save Complete Page As” option resulted in a perfect copy consisting of 95 files. (The performance issues of a page which requires 95 files is another story… but it illustrates the huge difference.)

This add-on is configurable too, e.g. to save iframes and even to try and correct links (which feature I can’t vouch for.)

Anyway webdev and QA types may get some mileage out of this one.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4723

Cheers

This happens to me all the time; I accidentally enter the wrong username into a form field, and then every time I come back to that site my browser suggests this wrong value in the autocomplete dropdown list. To delete a given entry from the autocomplete dropdown, simply:

- Type in the form field until the dropdown appears
- Use the up or down arrow to move to the entry to be deleted
- Press Shift + Delete in FF (or just Delete in IE)

That’s it, the bad autocomplete option is gone.

I share a monitor between a Mac Pro tower and a Dell PC laptop, using a KVM switch. A couple days ago, toggling to the Mac resulted in a totally blank screen. Thinking it was a problem w/ the KVM switch itself (as I’d run into this trouble w/ a previous switch) I plugged the monitor directly into the Mac… with no change. I was able to launch itunes using keyboard shortcuts, so I could confirm OS X was running fine. After restarting the Mac, doing tests on the monitor and googling around, I still was faced with no display. This is a particularly frustrating problem to have, since most solutions involve being able to see what you’re doing. Finally a friend and mac guru suggested I try resetting the PRAM. It worked! I’m posting this in case anyone else has Mac display issues.

To reset your Mac’s PRAM:
1. Power the machine down
2. Hold down Command+Option+P+R all at the same time
3. Power the machine back up, while holding those keys down
4. Listen for the boot chimes to sound several times (I cycled it 5 times before releasing the keys)
5. Release the keys and cross your fingers.

With luck the reset PRAM will eliminate whatever temporary issue was getting in your way.
Here’s Apple’s page on this topic: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

Many thanks to EJ for the help!

This will only interest web developers.

Using Firefox 3.0.10 on XP, with the firebug console open, I kept noticing seemingly arbitrary errors like this:
[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED) [nsIRequest.name]” nsresult: “0×80004001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED)” location: “JS frame :: file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsLoginManager.js :: anonymous :: line 282″ data: no]
file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsLoginManager.js
Line 282

I finally realized this was triggered by using the right-click context menu option “View Selection Source” (which is very useful for examining generated markup, e.g. after scripted DOM manipulation). It’s a minor bug in Mozilla’s code that seems harmless enough.

Anyway thought I’d share in case anyone else is scratching their head wondering why this error is polluting their console logs.

Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for dreaming up the web 20 years ago. I’ve been making a living on it for more than half of its existence so I’ve got a lot to thank him for. =)

cnet.com article

Hi
It’s more convenient for me to post to twitter sometimes, and though I may integrate those posts into this website at some point, for now there’s quite a bit that doesn’t make it here. So, if you have any interest in twitter and/or my random writings on technology, culture, interesting websites and my personal life, please follow me there. Thanks!

http://twitter.com/cweekly

This is really awesome; this guy takes random youtube videos and mixes them — both the audio and video — to make something infinitely better: