As part of my planning for 2010, I decided to write new vision statements for some of my web sites and put myself back on a content creation schedule.

This site (ardentdev.com) will now be updated every Wednesday, so stay tuned via the RSS feed or subscribe by email.

New Design

I decided to simplify the design, opting for a clean white background, more whitespace, and less colour.  Hope you find it easier to read.

Page Size Optimization

One of my goals in redesigning the site was to reduce the page size a bit.  I like to include images in my posts so going overboard on optimization wasn’t going to make total load time much better, but small improvements are always welcome.

Thanks, YSlow

To measure my optimization progress, I used YSlow.  YSlow is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug.  Firebug is a web development add-on for Firefox.  I highly recommend you hook yourself up with the Firefox + Firebug + YSlow triad of awesome if you do any web development.

My quest for page size reduction began with cleaning out the old WordPress theme.  For example, by removing Recent Posts and Recent Comments from the footer, I reduced the amount of HTML and gained the happy side effect of reducing the number of database hits required to build a page.

ArdentDev.com serves its HTML content compressed.  At the time of the design switch, the old theme was sending down 13.7K of compressed HTML for the home page.  The theme changes reduced that to 12.4K.  Dropping the number of posts shown on the home page from 10 to 5 brought things down to 7.7K.  That’s 6K less than the original (not including images from posts no longer visible on the home page).

I did a clean up of the CSS files for the site as well.  The site has a CSS file for web browsers and a CSS file for printing.  With some editing and some whitespace removal, the CSS files went from 4.6K down to 3.2K.  It was not a super thorough scrub of the CSS, but I trimmed another 1.4K.

The previous theme referenced nine images via the CSS file.  I dumped all those extraneous little images, which knocked  29.8K off the page size.  I then introduced a new logo that added back 2K.  That left a 27.8K reduction, not to mention 8 fewer HTTP requests.

I also dropped a banner ad that removed 0.4K of JavaScript and an additional HTTP request (plus another subsequent HTTP request to download the ad itself).

Net Gain (Well, Net Loss Really…)

The total reduction in page size came out to 35.6K as well as 9 fewer HTTP requests (not counting the request for the banner ad).  For a broadband Internet user, the optimizations should make the home page load 1/10 to 1/4 of a second faster than before.  Not a massive savings but a rewarding exercise as I searched for ways to reduce the bulk of the home page.

Everyone’s mileage will vary but please leave a comment about your own page optimization experiences.

Previous YSlow Stats

New YSlow Stats

While doing some Facebook Connect development, I found that the expected cookies were not being set when developing on localhost.  To fix the problem, I added localhost.local to my hosts file (pointing at 127.0.0.1) and changed the settings for my Facebook application to use localhost.local as the base domain.

I’ve been doing some work with ASP.NET MVC but was having periodic issues with Visual Studio 2008 hanging (freezing / becoming unresponsive) when I tried to run my web application with debugging.  The problem only occurred with a specific web project.

I tried deleting the Temporary ASP.NET Files (%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files) but that did not solve the problem.

I tried deleting the obj folder.  No luck.

I tried waiting it out one evening.  I eventually feel asleep and when I awoke sometime in the middle of the night, my web app was happily waiting for input and Visual Studio debugging was completely responsive.  That proved to be a temporary salve.

The problem resurfaced again a few days later and I finally figured out the problem with my uncooperative debugger.  I have a folder containing approximately 20,000 images that are not included in the Visual Studio web project but are sitting in a directory in the web site.  I had turned on "Show All Files" in Solution Explorer to add some script files into the project.  When "Show All Files" is off, F5 (Start Debugging) works like  champ.  When "Show All Files" is on, Visual Studio becomes unresponsive.  In reality it is not "frozen" but simply taking a very long time to process those 20,000 image files.

Mystery solved.

While my buddy Jason Row was traveling home from the awesomeness that was TechDays Halifax 2009, Mother Nature invoked the Deflate() method on his tire.

How does a software developer change a car tire in the dark?  By the light of his laptop screen of course:

Nice!

(BTW, Jason is currently job hunting if you know someone looking to tap into that creative thinking.  You can find Jason on LinkedIn or contact him via his blog.)

If you’re heading to Halifax, Nova Scotia for the only sold out TechDays show in Canada (November 2-3, 2009), you might be wondering what to do when you’re not at the conference.  Here are some suggestions:

Rogue’s Roost Brew Pub

This is my favourite place to eat in downtown Halifax.  The floors are sticky, the service isn’t great, but the chicken fingers and ale are wonderful.  Make sure you get the honey dill dipping sauce with your fingers.

Surfing

OK, you’d have to be nuts to go surfing in Nova Scotia in November.  Of course the SurfDonkey boys are clearly nuts: http://surfdonkey.ca/.

Bad Dad Location Hunt

Step 1: Watch http://baddad.tv/

Step 2: Wander around Halifax trying to recognize locations from the show.  Good luck.

Stalking Craig Moore…

…and asking him repeatedly when the heck we’ll get another episode of Bad Dad. ;)  [he looks like this: http://vimeo.com/2117659]

Visit Freak Lunchbox

“Freak Lunchbox searches the world to find the weirdest, newest and hippest candy and pop culture items on the market.”

How can you NOT visit this place!?

[Nearby Sweet Janes is also worth visiting.]

Take the Ferry

OK, I’m not sure exactly why you’d want to do this, but you could take the ferry over to Dartmouth just for fun (I guess).

This was someone else’s idea.  I’m not officially endorsing it…

There is a Tim Horton’s in the ferry terminal.  I suppose that’s something.

Climb Citadel Hill (National Historic Site)

Worth the uphill climb, the Citadel’s stone fortress offers amazing views of the city and the harbor to its visitors. The view from the Citadel will show you the amazing architecture of downtown between the hilltop and harbor; the harbor’s mouth of wooded islands; and the naval dockyard under the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge, which connects Halifax and Dartmouth. Just 9 blocks from the waterfront, the Citadel has been restored to look much as the fort did in 1856.

http://www.halifaxkiosk.com/halifax-tour/Citadel-National-Historic-Park.php

Note: November 1 to May 6, the grounds are open but no services are available.  Here some photos of the Citadel if you’re unfamiliar with it: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=halifax+citadel.

Attend the Bonus Session on the Interoperable Web Platform

I’m giving a bonus session on the Interoperable Web Platform on Monday afternoon (4:20pm in the Servers, Security, and Management track room according to my info).

I’ll be covering some uber goodness like running PHP on IIS (I run 6 WordPress sites on IIS7 as well as http://tyny.ca), SuperPreview, the SEO Toolkit for IIS.

And my slides are gorgeous!  Very few bullet points.  You’ll definitely want to be there.

Follow Me on Twitter

If there are other things happening, I will announce them via Twitter.  Follow @derekhat or just watch http://twitter.com/derekhat and http://search.twitter.com/search?q=techdays_ca.

(photo credit: citadel)