John Blackmore

New Programming Jargon

Funny post of commonly used terms to describe those programming moments where things aren’t exactly right.

Speed up page loads with head.js

Last year Google made some changes to it’s algorithm that meant that page load speed was becoming a contributing factor in it’s search engine ranking algorithm. This means that if your website loads slowly you could be suffering in the SERPs.

One way to streamline the loading of your site is to parallel load your JS files, and you can further improve load time by placing those JavaScript links at the bottom of your page.

Head.js aims to make this all easy for you, by allowing parallel downloads of JS files as well as a whole bunch of other nice features such as a CSS moderniser, HTML5 enabler, browser detection, feature detection and screen size detector.

In short it does the job of about 5 or more other scripts and it weighs in at just 6.4kb in minified form, so it’s small as well. Give it a go in your next project and see what it can do for you.

It's OK to cheat with CSS3 Generator

As a web developer some people think that you need to know everything off the top of your head and that knowing it makes you good at your job. This isn’t the case, you don’t need to know it all, you just need to know where to find the information when you need it.

I haven’t learnt all the possible combinations of features for CSS3, why should I need to? In most cases when you are working on websites or applications you have the Internet on tap, so as long as there are websites such as CSS3generator.com I don’t need to learn those bits that I only use maybe 2-3% of my time.

In short, it’s OK to cheat sometimes. Just make sure you know the bits you use all the time, which in my case is PHP and MySQL and not CSS3.