In Google’s Chromium blog this week, they announced that a new project called SPDY (pronounced SPeeDY) would make the world twice as fast. When I say ‘world’, I mean the Internet which is the only real world for a lot of people.

Google has always had faster pages than the rest of us and it isn’t all down to muscle. Soon we will be able catch up with them. According to the SPDY whitepaper…

The SPDY project defines and implements an application-layer protocol for the web which greatly reduces latency. The high-level goals for SPDY are:

• To target a 50% reduction in page load time. Our preliminary results have come close to this target (see below).
• To minimize deployment complexity. SPDY uses TCP as the underlying transport layer, so requires no changes to existing networking infrastructure.
• To avoid the need for any changes to content by website authors. The only changes required to support SPDY are in the client user agent and web server applications.

A while ago I found a post where someone mused about why there weren’t any completely visual programming languages. Meaning, why weren’t there any programming languages where you just snapped pieces together like Legos to create software.

The other day I took my son to a Family Math Day event and ran across one completely by chance. Some boffins at MIT must have been thinking the same thing one day and came up with Scratch (see http://scratch.mit.edu). As you can see in the image on the right, you click together pieces representing code instead of typing to create a program. It looks simple, and it is but don’t be fooled. Although this is meant to help kids discover how much fun programming can be, it can do some amazing things. The scratch website has hundreds of programs that kids and adults have uploaded. They range from simple image manipulation to complete interactive games. You may find yourself fighting your kids for time on the computer to finish your latest creation.

Google, those kings of speedy webpages, has let us in on a few of their secrets. Some of this stuff seems obvious if you just sat down and thought about it for a few minutes but there are a few gems here as well such as…

• Really optimizing web graphics (obvious but seems to be a forgotten art)
• HTTP caching headers
• Minimizing browser reflow
• CSS: only using declarations once

Read the details here:

Web Speed Tips from Google

It used to be that checking your website in all the different permutations of browsers and operating systems was a big pain or expensive. Thanks to a cool online application called Browsershots (www.browsershots.org) that’s no longer the case. Just enter the URL of your site or page you wish to check, choose which browsers you are concerned about and hit submit. It’s that easy.

Like most online browser checking software, the different versions of your site don’t come up immediately. Sometimes you need to wait for up to 30 minutes to see all the screenshots. Also, it’s impossible to check everything on the page since you only get a static screenshot and no mouse-over effects, etc. However, Browsershots will show you if the latest beta version of IE is breaking your site without having to download it and it covers Linux browsers as well.

Open source software has really come of age. Most of the web servers on the planet rely on at least one open source application and many servers are entirely powered by open source. Desktop open source applications have arrived as well. Many neophyte webbies have no idea that Firefox is open source and may not really care.

Whether you care about how an application you use was created, you may care about how much you pay for it. How does the word free sound? To good to be true. Nonesense! The next time you need something to write your resume with or crop the beautiful new photo of your child, check out AlternativesTo http://alternativeto.net. Just click on the application you would have had to pay for and you will see a huge list of open source alternatives. These aren’t slapped together, half-hearted apps. These are fully featured, stable applications you’ve just never heard of. Try one. What have you got to lose?

I am a complete Firefox extension junkie and finding a brilliant new one is like finding an extra present hidden under the X-hana-mas tree. There are many lists out there of great plugins but here are three that most miss.

ReloadEvery - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115
Ever wanted to leave a page in another tab to reload itself? Maybe you are following an Ebay auction or waiting for a queued request to be processed. This is the answer. ReloadEvery allows you to set a reload cycle for a page and get back to work. Want the page to reload every 15 seconds or 30 minutes? No problem. You can even set a custom time. Excellent!

Abduction - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=abduction&cat=all
I take a lot of screenshots and there has always been at least one extra step involved. Either I had to crop the image, assemble multiple screenshots of a long page, save it in an external application, or save
it in a web safe format (remember idiotic Microsoft and their stupid BMP format). Now all I do is right-click to open Abduction inside of Firefox and save the page or anything on the page any way I want. Once it’s saved it’s ready to use. Brilliant!

MeasureIt - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=Measureit&cat=all Want to know how wide something is on a page or how wide something should be to fix a layout issue? You need MeasureIt. Just click the icon in the status bar and drag a marquee over anything on the page. I use this plug in several times a day and I don’t know how I could live without it. Super!