Xaprb

A while ago I switched my theme to Journalist (link at the very bottom of the page) because I thought it was well laid out and solidly designed -- I mean it uses sensible CSS and XHTML etc. The only thing I didn't care for was that it was a little too minimal, if anything. There are lots of themes out there that look gorgeous, but when I tested them they don't render right.

So I have made a hybrid. Just a few edits to CSS and borrowing a few images from the deLight theme later, and now I have something that pleases me visually too.

And in the process I wouldn't be surprised if I've broken something for Windows IE users or what have you. But I'm sure someone will let me know.

For future reference, I'm attaching an image of what it looks like.

Theme preview

I wanted to make readers who are web designers aware of a new resource for learning about raw performance (page load time and render time). This is the Web Scaling Blog, a blog my employer started a while ago and didn’t really update, but which is now starting to get some in-depth content thanks to a very smart colleague of mine, Nail Kashapov. There are a lot of practical, real-world examples of how you can dig deep into front-end performance and make your site really load fast. This is all in the interaction between the server and the browser — no backend database stuff at all.

Essentially it’s the same kind of things Steve Souders talks about in his (excellent) book High Performance Websites. Actually, if you’ll let me slip a little promotion in here, Steve himself has said some nice things about Nail’s work, which is front-end optimization (his background is as a web developer for many years — just like mine).

The beauty of front-end optimization is that it can dramatically improve user experience by making your site many times faster, and it generally doesn’t require esoteric knowledge. Of course, there are things that an expert can find that a layman can’t, but by and large you can teach yourself this stuff.

I am aware that this post might be seen as an advert, but I really don’t mean it that way — just want to share the frontend performance content with more people!