SORT Conference Presentations

This past week the church put on a technical conference (no not THAT conference) called SORT (no it doesn’t stand for anything). It was a two day conference held at the institute building at the University of Utah. There were over 850 attendees, 200+ classes and 6 keynotes. Yes, this was a serious conference.

Aside from the keynotes, all of the classes were given by people from inside the churches organizations. Employees from the ICS (IT) department, Family History, BYU and more. The conference ran smoother then most other conferences I have been to. They provided breakfast, lunch and snacks throughout the day. Class content ranged from beginner to advanced, from back end to front end, security to performance, and many many more topics. All in all, one of the best conferences I have attended.

I decided to punish myself (and others) by presenting at the conference. I gave 3 presentations: Intermediate jQuery, Advanced jQuery and Designing Faster Websites. The Faster Websites had so many people sign up for it that they gave it a second time slot as well so more people could see it. It’s awesome that so many people were interested in this subject to need that.

Several other NorthTemple-ites also presented.

• Nic Johnson presented an HTML5 and CSS3 class (also called upon for a repeat performance the second day… without his knowledge… when he forgot his laptop at home).
• Ted Boren on Conducting Customer Interviews.
• Emmy Southworth and Susan Jarvis presented a two part Basic Usability Skills class where they covered the basics of usability testing.
• Rob Thomas on Presentation Skills: How to Make Your Point.

Overall a great representation from our team to get these important topics in the minds of people from many disciplines.

Due to the church being understandably overly cautious about legal issues we will probably not be able to post our slides from our presentations. But I figured posting some links to stuff I mentioned would be beneficial to those who attended my presentations and others as well. This will not be the prettiest of lists, but some good information regardless.

Intermediate jQuery

Most of my presentation was a dive into the following pages. If I can get clearance to post the demos and my other optimization examples, I’ll post them.

• Selectors
• Traversing

Advanced jQuery

• Visual Easing demo – Canvas images showing what the easing looks like

Designing Faster Websites

I was glad so many people were interested in this topic. There is a lot of activity in this space lately and our users will thank us for making the extra effort.

• Google and Yahoo research – Quotes from the beginning of the presentation
• CSS Shorthand – Save some file size

General Performance

• Steve Souders – The foremost expert in Designing Faster Websites. In fact he wrote the book on it (twice).
• 14 Performance Rules
• Presentation by Nicole Sullivan from Yahoo (yes I blatantly stole her opening graphic)
• Aaron Barker’s performance links on delicious

Sprites

• Sprites explained
• Sprite Generators:
 Spritegen, 
Sprite me By Steve Souders. Can’t do local files, only sprites what is on the current page (not all the image files for the site).
• Sprite Examples
  • Google
  • Amazon
  • Apple
  • YouTube 149×2800
  • Yahoo 650×4600
  • Digg 200×1600

Tools

• Compressor Rater – Site for seeing the size of your minified files (minified = YUI Compressor)
• Firefox Throttle – Firefox plugin to test at other speeds (256k, 56k, etc. Windows only)
• YSlow – Firefox plugin for Firebug to see performance information.
• CSS Compressors (I haven’t used these, but here for completeness) – http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor/ http://www.csscompressor.com/ http://www.cssoptimiser.com/

posted by aaron on Wednesday, Oct 21, 2009 · 4 comments

Webslug: Helping measure the worldwide wait… sorta

Webslug claims it can “help you measure the worldwide wait.” Cool tagline, but I’m skeptical.

The time I got back on one site was infinitesimally small (less than a twentieth of a second) when personal experience shows it takes around 10 seconds. Another site showed over 40 seconds when my experience has been around 20 seconds. And finally the site doesn’t answer the question, “How fast is it at a given connection speed?” It just gives seconds to load without the context of a data rate. (The Firefox Throttle Add-On does this nicely, but only on the Windows version.)

On the upside, it does let you compare two sites to each other and collects measurements of all the sites that get tested for public review. I like these ideas, but Webslug will have to fix those deficiencies before I come back often.

One final wishlist item, the value of which was demonstrated in a presentation by Aaron Barker recently, is being able to see the difference between “page appears” (something happens to show the user that the site is loading), “page is partially functional”, and “page is fully functional” (100% loaded). If a page takes too long to appear initially, the user may get impatient and hit Refresh—which will actually delay them further by restarting the whole process. So even if it’s not fully functional there is value to getting something up there quick, even if it’s not the full meal deal. But I’m not sure an automated tool could really do that… Someone prove me wrong please!

See Webslug for yourself.

Also check Yahoo’s best practices for increasing performance on the front end. (Thanks for all your recent help on this stuff Aaron!)

posted by ted on Thursday, Jul 10, 2008