Post archives from 2003 to 2013, newest first.
Google Chrome 26 for Android includes an experimental setting to proxy all http scheme requests through Google servers over a SPDY connection backed by Page Speed optimizers for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image content.
Nike partnered with TechStars to attract ten startup companies to Portland, Oregon for three months to create new experiences and companies based on the Nike+ APIs.
Twitter now supports story summaries in an expanded Tweet view powered by Twitter Card markup. I wrote a PHP generator and WordPress plugin to help your content look good on Twitter. Associate your page with a Twitter account, display images in timeline, and more.
Google updated its webmaster recommendations for smartphone-optimized websites. You may need to change your site HTML and server headers to help Google’s various crawlers find your smartphone content and better associate the same pages optimized for various screen sizes.
Research firm Nielsen released updated statistics on smartphone application usage in the United States. The average Android and iOS user installs 41 applications and uses these applications 39 minutes each day.
LinkedIn shares their evaluation process for choosing a client-side templating solution from 18 different options across 15 formal metrics.
Chrome 15 and above supports mapping input fields to specific types of data to improve the accuracy of autofill tools. The new WHATWG autocompletetype attribute proposal from Ilya Sherman of Google proposes 36 mapped tokens and two sections for autofill agents entering name, address, contact, credit card, business, or birthday data in a web browser.
Open Graph protocol is a set of HTML+RDF markup elements used to summarize webpages on the public Internet when those pages are shared on Facebook, Google+, mixi, LinkedIn, and more. In this post I will summarize Open Graph protocol markup for easy inclusion in your site templates.
Google’s mobile search engine crawler now uses an updated User-Agent string designed to trigger iPhone-specific renderings of web pages.
Microsoft released a developer preview of Windows 8 at this week’s BUILD conference including a preview release of the next version of Internet Explorer. The new browser runs in two modes: with and without plugins. Microsoft is bundling a special compatibility view list to spoof iPhone, iPad, or even Firefox User-Agents to trigger special views on websites designed for a plugin-free or full-screen experience.
Google released Chrome 13 into its stable channel this morning with over 5200 revisions including Instant Pages. If your webpages are not already differentiating between attended and unattended pageviews using the Page Visibility API for site analytics (and other functions assuming live eyeballs and the opportunity for interaction with page elements) your pageview numbers are now likely inflated.
Google search result pages now trigger a prefetch of top search result links in an effort to make navigating search results as easy as changing channels on your television. If Google’s search algorithms determine there is a significant probability of user click-through on particular result they will instruct supporting browsers to preload the entire destination page including images, JavaScript, advertisements, and analytics. Update your web pages to be aware of the current page visibility state and track interactions, not background tasks.
The Google Chrome team released new statistics and implementation details on their proposed “False Start” abbreviated TLS handshake. Google claims the new handshake, introduced in version 9 of the Chrome browser in February, shaves an average of 120 milliseconds from a typical four-flight TLS handshake by accepting application data before both sides have communicated a “Finished” status.
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H.264 is not a single video codec; it is a family of codecs with some shared shortcuts grouped into 17 sets of profiles and 16 levels of constraints. Video creators and playback software share a mutual understanding of these shortcuts, which are often accelerated by specialized chipsets. This post examines a few of the many flavors of H.264 video and their application in mobile, desktop, and Flash Player environments.
The emerging HTML5 specification lifts video playback out of the generic object element and into specialized video handlers. Explicit markup for audio and video places elevates moving pictures to a similar native rendering capacity as img markup we are used to but with more fine-grained details about underlying formats and compression available before loading. In this post I will dive into implementation details of HTML5 video based on currently available consuming agents and outline some of the nuances of preparing media for playback.
Google will roll out a change to its search results pages later this week designed to better capture outbound clicks. Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header.
This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network’s reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month. Jason Sobel, a former NetApp engineer, led Facebook’s effort to design a more cost-effective and high-performance storage system for their unique needs.
On Thursday BusinessWeek reported Facebook is seeking new financing for its data center operation growth in 2009. Facebook continues to add new members and their associated content at an extremely fast pace, with most new growth coming from international markets. Facebook needs to expand its abilities to serve these markets by bolstering current infrastructure offerings and cutting latency to its members through new international points of presence. In this post I will take a deeper look at Facebook’s current computing infrastructure and related expenses and examine likely new areas of investment in 2009.
Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and east the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this post I will cover the major categories of enhanced share types — audio, images, video, news, blogs, games, documents, and multimedia — and walk through how site owners can stand out on shareable platforms.
In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings?
Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets.
Google released App Engine 1.1.9 this week, including new capacity ceilings for developers and better compatibility with existing Python code. The new App Engine supports standard HTTP libraries, larger files, triples the response deadline, and removes limitations on CPU-intensive processes.
The current economic uncertainties have changed the high-end restaurant industry, but not in the ways you might think. On Friday evening I had drinks with owners of two well-known restaurants in San Francisco. Total diners is up, staff is more committed, and menus have expanded. Web businesses can learn from these service industry adjustments.
Micro-blogging service Twitter will celebrate its third birthday in March and may have a revenue model to support the company over the long-term. Last month Twitter CEO Evan Williams told Kevin Maney of Porfolio.com the company will kick off new revenue streams by March 2009 to avoid raising another round of venture capital funding. Twitter’s deeply engaged community would love to see a sustainable business develop around the site, its services, and the community. In this post I will take a deeper look at Twitter and its revenue potential as publicly hinted by its founders.