Yearly Archives: 2011

Google Launches Page Speed Service

Google recently launched a Page Speed Service, an offering along similar lines to CloudFlare. You set up a CNAME to point your domain to their servers, which cache your pages and serve them at blazing speed. They also run everything through the lines of mod_pagespeed to lower file sizes. It’s basically like a CDN for your entire website.

Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.

This is targeted mainly at people running small to medium sized websites, such as WordPress blogs, on shared hosting. The service takes the load off your server, so you don’t have to worry about it running slowly or going down from traffic.

Page Speed Service is currently in a trial period, where it’s free for anyone who wants to use it, but it may end up costing more in the future.

It will be interesting to see how this competes with CloudFlare, which offers more features and a free plan that is more than sufficient for most users. (You can pay $20/month for extra analytics and some more advanced features.) CloudFlare isn’t just trying to speed your site up, though. They also want to help protect it from DDoS attacks, email harvesting, and other unpleasantness. It already has quite a bit of traction.

BlogBuzz August 20, 2011

Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger HTML5 Boilerplate 2.0 is now available Object-Oriented PHP: Autoloading, Serializing, and Querying Objects Persistent Headers Google, needing patents, buys Motorola wireless for $12.5 billion Building a Jabber Client for iOS: Interface Setup Creating Reusable & Versatile…

Disable Domain Highlighting in Firefox

If you just upgraded to Firefox 6, you probably noticed the new “domain highlighting” feature. The address bar now greys-out the protocol and path in the URL, leaving the domain highlighted in the darker black text. The theory is that it will help less-savvy…

Minus: Simple File Sharing

There are already a few services—like CloudApp and Droplr—that allow you to simply drag a file and instantly share it via a short URL. There’s a newer one that I’ve been seeing lately on Twitter. It’s name is Minus. Minus is primarily a web…

BlogBuzz August 13, 2011

Missing the Favorites Menu in WordPress? Add a Makeshift Replacement.

In WordPress 3.2, the favorite actions menu was removed during the latest UI refresh. If you’re like me, you had used its hooks to add your own links to frequently-used sections of the admin. I had even made a plugin that allowed me to…

5 Sites to Find Free PSD Resources for Your Web Designs

Looking for some high-quality PSD resources? Maybe your design skills are lacking and you need some professional-quality elements for the theme you’re making for your blog. Or maybe you need some social media icons. Or maybe you’re just don’t feel like reinventing the wheel…

BlogBuzz August 6, 2011

Getting Your Feet Wet with PDO and Migrating Old MySQL Code

You may have heard that the old MySQL extension for PHP is going to eventually be deprecated in favor of the newer (and potentially more secure) MySQLi and PDO extensions. You’re going to need to update your old code sooner or later, so why…

Google +1 Content Unlocker with jQuery

You’ve probably seen sites like MacHeist and Make Use Of run promotions where you can unlock a software license or enter a drawing for an iPad by posting a message to Twitter or Facebook and then entering your email address into a form that…