Xaprb

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!

It’s been a while since I have updated my JavaScript formatting and parsing functions, and people have been posting comments on them. Unfortunately my interests have really turned elsewhere, and I’m not much in the world of frontend web design anymore. There’s good news though: now I’ve made it easy for you to get the code, change the code, document it, report issues on it, and so forth. I’ve hosted the code at Google Code.

The project is called flexible-js-formatting and includes my fast,flexible formatting and parsing functions for dates, times and numbers. As a bonus, I threw in the code for the Date Chooser and the HTML Input Mask, so pretty much everything is there.

All you need to do is grab a copy of the Subversion repository and hack to your heart’s content. One person has already contributed some work to reorganize the files and add some of his own patches.

If you’re looking to make the code better, you can scan the comments on my old posts for user-suggested improvements that never made it into the code.