As I’ve reported on the blog for my Volvo 1800S (aka 64SAINT), it’s being featured in episode 5 of season 20 of My Classic Car with Dennis Gage. The preview has just gone up on YouTube […]
READ MOREOver the New Year break, I decided it was time for a change here on the Algorithms for the Masses blog. Not necessarily a full-blown New Year Resolution, more a general feeling that the current theme was old in the tooth, had accumulated a whole bunch of cruft (and how!), and it was time to chuck it in the bin of history. Time for something clean, and, horror, responsive. […]
READ MOREBack in March last year I presented an implementation of Heap’s Algorithm – an algorithm devised to generate all permutations of a set of items – in JavaScript. The article was interesting to write because in doing so I had found a bug in the pseudo-code on the Wikipedia page for the algorithm, which led to a discussion with the main editor for the page on how to make it better. […]
READ MOREThe one issue that’s weird about JavaScript that I’ve found is that it has no compiler: the first time you find a bug is when you run your code, not when you compile it. So, since I’m adamant about writing “good” JavaScript code as I write it, I’ve installed a couple of JSLint plug-ins, one for Visual Studio and one for Sublime Text. JSLint is Douglas Crockford’s linter for JavaScript and, although utterly (perhaps barmily?) strict in certain areas, is the one I’ve settled on for checking/validating my code before I run it. […]
READ MOREJust a very small post, this, to announce that I’m now using Open Live Writer (OLW) as my blogging tool. Maybe not all the time, at least for the next couple of weeks. You could say that I’m still experimenting with the plug-ins I have for Windows Live Writer (WLW), so no code snippet blocks yet or “Now Playing”. Those are to be tested and played around with some more before I really jump in with both feet and uninstall WLW. […]
READ MOREA couple of months ago, I was on a “Update All The Things” spree with my websites. In one of them, the blog I have for my Volvo 1800S, I’m using a purchased theme that I’ve left pretty much alone. It’s fine as far as it goes, a bit inefficient, but it did serve as a basis for my articles here on speeding up web pages (1, 2, 3). After I had written those it was time to fix the problems with the theme. […]
READ MOREAlthough this certainly didn’t all come about from the get-go, this is a fun little graphic for the different ways to contact me: […]
READ MORENow that we’ve seen that it’s perception that defines how your users grade the speed of your webpages (although I’m not going to argue that spending a good deal of time speeding things up in an absolute sense will not go amiss), and how to analyze the network traffic that goes into displaying your pages (one, two), it’s time to look for solutions to the performance issues we saw. […]
READ MOREIn the previous episode of this series I discussed why you might want to speed up your web pages and how it is more about perceived performance, rather than absolute performance. However, this optimization, as with anything, comes with a cost. If you have a site that receives occasional use, then maybe you don't want to overdo the time and effort that these performance optimizations might entail. Or maybe what I'll be describing may not go far enough: in which case, I hope the analysis side of things helps you more. […]
READ MORERecently, I had occasion to want to read an article on <a well-known development company>’s developer blog. It took, believe it or not, over 17 seconds to load and display on my wired connection, around 10 seconds longer than I would have waited if I hadn’t have wanted to read the content. Apparently on a phone it took over 60 seconds to load. I ran it under Firebug because I just didn’t believe it and wanted to see what would take so long. This is the tweet I sent: […]
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