Archive for June, 2008

The title says it all.

If you have installed on your machine, it’s best for you to not to use any web apps that incorporate destructive links, as you might find out one day that you’ve removed page content, left groups you intentionally joined, deleted users on your site etc – the list could go on.

Background

Straight from the :-

“Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.”

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

• Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
• Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
• Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
• Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
• Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
• Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Essentially, it prefetches pages to cache by spidering links that present on the page your viewing at a given time. So this begs the question – what links are, and aren’t prefetchable? Well, state that in line with the HTTP 1.1 spec, “‘the GET method is defined as a Safe Method which “SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval.’ In practice, Google Web Accelerator does not prefetch links which have query parameters (i.e. have a “?” in the URL) and encrypted pages (i.e. URL starting with https://).”

In v1.0 we could directly target it as it identified its requests with a “X-moz: prefetch” header, however apparently in v2.0, the header has dissapeared. Having said that, it’s slightly strange that Google haven’t updated their pages to reflect the apparent changes in v2.0

Although I have no first-hand experience of this, it was highlighted to me (cheers ) when I was implementing the UI for a past project.

I’ll let you read through a number of useful comments on the subject submitted by readers… I’m off to bed.

I was browsing the Guardian newspaper a couple of months ago (I meant to publish this post a couple of days after reading the article) and came across an article entitled, “Internet Explorer aims to embrace the web again“, so decided to take a closer look. Admittedly it was the first time I had read the Technology section of the Guardian, and considering the mainstream format that a lot of broadsheets have, was pleasantly surprised to find the article went into somewhat more depth than I had expect it would do.

As you can read if you visit the link, the article starts off by explaining what Acid2 is and the hype at Mix08 surrounding IE8. What I found particularly interesting in the article was a single comment from Eric Meyer; it reads, “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be very, very promising…”. He does actually mention that he’s “never had any inside track” from the IE guys, and granted, his comments did come before MS released a document outlining planned CSS support in the IE8 final release (which I talk more about in a ), but still…

So, I’ve come back from a five week break in which I’ve managed to do almost all of the things that I wanted to do in that time; I got myself into shape again (kind of) by going out on my bike every day, went to a few Unis (DMU Leicester, Kent, Bristol & Manchester) to visit a few mates, finished watching all seven series of The Sopranos and played a fair amount of GTA IV.

Also during my time off I was approached by an old acqaintance from Teachers TV, who has persuaded me to take up a position as Senior ID on a fairly large-scale project in Reading; unfortunately, I can’t really say anymore than that at the moment!

A couple of weeks ago I attended the first day of @Media London (too hungover from the end of day drinking for the second). It was great to finally put faces to names (and amusing avatars); from CSS3.Info, I met both Peter and David, and the party after the first was a great chance to meet a few new faces. It was great to meet Lachlan Hunt and speak to him after his and James Graham’s informative talk on HTML5. After we drank the bar dry, a few of us went onto a small Italian restaurant (complete with it’s own real-life take of a Sopranos scene) across the river, where I had a chance to chat to John Resig along with a few others.

At the conference there were a couple of developers from the BBC who talked about the new sites design (homepage in particular) in more detail. One interesting piece of news that came from their talk was that they decided to build themselves a bespoke JS library from the ground up due to the vast array of browsers that they have to support (apparently FF 1.3 is particularly troublesome with JQuery). From what I recollect, they were mentioning that it might be released within the next couple of months.

So sorry guys for the lack of posts within the last few weeks, but promise you’ll see a lot more activity from now on