I’m currently in the process of updating my site design and rather impatiently decided to put it live even though its not quite finished. This does mean section of the site aren’t going to be styled properly, especially the blog as it hacks into my main site for resources and CSS styles.
Please bear with me while I get it all sorted.
Thanks.
October is defiantly conference season for me, with the PHPNW conference at the start of the month and now WDC towards the end.
The Web Developers Conference is aimed at both professionals and students, and focuses on the front end side of web development.
The schedule has now been released, and the speakers have been known for a while, there are a couple of well-known speakers that will be there so I’m really looking forward to this and hopefully learning a few things front end related , as a PHP developer that’s where my skills aren’t so strong.
Tickets are still available at a very reasonable £50 for the days festivities, and will be entering a Late Bird stage at the start of October, so get your tickets now to avoid disappointment if they sell out or go past your budget! Various discount codes are floating around on Twitter if you need one, or just ask one of the speakers if you’re struggling.
You can find out more information on the conference website http://webdevconf.com/
Last year I wrote a brief post about my first trip to the Manchester based PHP developer conference, PHPNW10. It’s now almost a year later and this years conference is just 1 month away so I think it’s about time I did a little plug for them and try to convince anyone that stumbles upon this post to buy a ticket and attend.
PHPNW is a user group meetup of PHP developers based in Manchester, with the aim of sharing experiences and improving knowledge of all things PHP (and other related technologies). The group meet the first Tuesday of the month for a 40 min or so talk on the speakers chosen topic. They held their first conference in 2008 and have had one each year since. Find out more on the conference About page. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in May last year, I wrote a post about a new Firebug (for Firefox) Plug-in called Page Speed, that allowed you to test the load time of your website and get some useful tips on how to improve this.
This week, Google took that idea and extended it into an independent online tool, making it available for anyone on any browser. It uses a version of WebKit installed on a server to run the test (via the Chrome version of Page Speed Im guessing) to test your site and suggest improvements.
It seems to work in exactly the same way, and suggests the same kinds of things to improve your score, and has the same issues I pointed out last time, in that it marks you down for incorrect caching on Google Services you include on your page (Analytics in my case).
When I first ran the test on my site, I had dropped to 76/100, this was down to the javascript includes I had slowing things down, and the image caching wasn’t long enough. A couple of tweaks later and I’m now back up to 96/100 which is 3 above where I got to last year.
Read the Google post or start testing your site, please note tho, that as its being hosted on the Google Labs site, this could (as many have done before) disappear without warning. If it does I’ll update this post to reflect that.
Last night I went along to the latest standards>next meetup, to learn about the exciting new features we get to play with in CSS3 and though I’d share the slides. Read the rest of this entry »