Author: Sergey Chernyshev

Web Performance talk at NY Web Standards Meetup

The New York Web Standards MeetupI’m giving a talk about Web Performance at NY Web Standards Meetup on March 19th.

I’ll talk about the performance of Web applications and sites in general, why it matters and what can be done to improve it. Presentation covers both front and back-end performance, with emphasis on the front-end and it will be useful for everyone from designers to system administrators.

General understanding of web development is required, but a wide range of performance tuning techniques, available to every skill level, will be covered.

I’ll be happy to see you there, but you need to RSVP – only 10 seats left already, so you better hurry.

Google Gadgets on your wiki

Finally, I spent some time researching Google Gadgets implementation
and implemented it successfully as MediaWiki widget: http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Google_Gadget

Previously I had some issues with it as there was no control over the
values in the URLs without escaping them, but Gadget wizard didn’t
really allow to easily copy unescaped values for the URL. To avoid
this problem, I added new feature to the Widgets extension to support
validation of parameters without escaping them so to use Google Gadgets widget, you’ll have to upgrade your installation to version 0.8.3: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets#Download_instructions

This dramatically expands the amount of widgets/gadgets you can install on your wiki – previously there were only Widgetbox widgets getting which required much more hassle and relied on the user account to be created on Widgetbox site which in my view reduced adoption.

So go to Google Gadgets catalog and grab what you like: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open
;)

As always, help is available at http://groups.google.com/group/mediawiki-widgets or just post your comments here.

Any good links about URL planning?

I’m trying to summarize my knowledge about the URLs and research all possible aspects of URL planning and design to write up something useful for others to use.

If you have any links to good articles, presentations, research papers or something, please send them my way (post as comments here, or twitt them at me @sergeyche or send them to @sergeychernyshev at identi.ca or email me at sergey . chernyshev at gmail).

Will really appreciate your help!

History Hacker on History Channel

Bre Pettis is launching a History Hacker series on History Channel. Judging by his “Weekend Projects” podcast that he did for Make Magazine, it’s going to be good.

First pilot is going to air on September 26th at 8 and midnight. Watch it – it’ll help to have a series.

Here’s the trailer:

More links:

Too bad I can’t watch it – hope someday it all is going to be on-demand only.