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Using Content Delivery Networks or Content Distribution Networks (CDN) is a good way to speed up a website. In short, a CDN distributes assets like JavaScript files, images, or CSS files to locations all over the world, so that users of the websites download the assets from a close location. This helps to reduce routing hops and to decrease latency. A few months ago Amazon started a CDN service called Cloud Front. Although, Cloud Front is the New Kid in the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Family and still beta, it already has good tool support and works just fine. In fact, it is no problem to set up your own CDN with Rails and Cloud Front in just a few minutes. Continue Reading »

I am kind of a performance geek, I like it lean and fast. Although I have to admit that in many cases optimization is not useful or not relevant (I learned a couple of lessons in this area), it is always interesting. As my focus more and more shifts to Web development, I am constantly looking for ways to speed up things. In fact I think Web development is one of the software areas where performance optimization is constantly neglected.

Images are a great portion of a website, they help to make it fancy and good looking. They also have great potential for optimization, to speed up your website and minimize you traffic. There are several ways to improve image size and , you don’t have to know them at all, just use smush.it! Smush.it is a tool from Yahoo performance team members that let you optimize your images on the fly. Normally I would now explain how to use the tool and so forth, but not smush.it. It is as simple as it can be. Just go to the website and get a free overhaul for your images. Oh and btw plans are to make the tool open source Love it