dirtyBlog

After realizing dirtyBeta gets a D (63) in YSlow, I decided to fix that ASAP. So today I decided to fix this.

What’s This Mean?

Why, faster page loads of course! When you visit dirtyBeta, you should notice lightning fast page rendering thanks to Firebug and YSlow.

How I Did It

1. Added a CDN: You can consider this cheating if you like (it kind of is), but not everybody has the benefit of having a separate robust server just to serve up static files. Since it doesn’t really reflect on the engineering on the site, I added dirtyBeta to my preferences and got a letter-grade boost. Booya!
2. Removed ETags:
   This was a really simple fix:FileETag none

   ETags really only make sense if you’ve got multiple servers holding your static files, which dirtyBeta currently does not.

3. Added an Expires Header:
   I meant to do this before launching the site, but I figured there’d be some really basic CSS changes I wanted to do directly after launch (and I was right), so I held off. Well, enough waiting. I added this:

ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus 10 years”



   To my Apache conf, and we’re good to go! This is what finally landed my A, which I’m very pleased with, especially considering it’s not possible on my day job’s site.

What’s Next?

Improvements can always be made! I could make fewer HTTP requests by spriting some images (got a C on that) and figure out why my CSS and JS files aren’t getting GZIPed. Oh well, another time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 6:54 pm and is filed under development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.