Author Archive
getpersonas.com status
We've seen a huge spike in traffic to getpersonas.com due to our prompted update for Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 users to upgrade to 3.6. Some users may have seen a degradation in site speed and reliability during the past 12 hours. Our amazing IT team has been hard at work keeping the site up and has fixed most of the performance issues. We also turned off search functionality temporarily to alleviate load. We'll turn it back on as soon as we can, thanks for your patience! Read More »
Making getpersonas.com blazing fast
I love speed. I'm a speed fanatic. Fast cars, planes, skydiving, anything involving triple digit MPH. But the thing that I like fast the most is websites. Millisecond response times, content delivery networks, caching, sprites, you name it. In case you didn't already know, Personas (AKA 'lightweight themes') have been integrated into Firefox 3.6. With the impeding tsunami of traffic from millions of Firefox users headed towards getpersonas.com, I knew my time had come. Donning Firebug, YSlow and webpagetest.org, I set out to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it. I knew my work would be painstaking, arduous ... Read More »
getpersonas.com 2.1 has launched!
If getpersonas.com seems a little bit snappier today, there's a reason. Last night we released a new version of the website that utilizes a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that makes browsing getpersonas.com even faster. What's a CDN, you ask? To put it simply, a CDN moves content that normally would be served from a website in one location and stores it all around the world, making it faster for you, the user to download it. We're using a CDN to store images, JavaScript and CSS for getpersonas.com. Another neat trick we ... Read More »
CSS Gradients Tutorials
hacks.mozilla.org has two great tutorials up about CSS gradients available in Firefox 3.6: css gradients in Firefox 3.6building beautiful buttons with css gradients Really awesome stuff, looking forward to seeing more and more designs that are normally done with lots of images to be created with CSS! Read More »
AMO Changes for 2010
Yesterday Wil Clouser wrote up a blog post detailing infrastructure changes for addons.mozilla.org in 2010. Notable changes are: Migrating from CakePHP to Django Moving from SVN to Git Continuous integration Faster deployment Processing data offline Improved documentation Take a look, it's a good overview of the technical challenges of managing a large and complex website at an enormous scale. Read More »
HTML5 Audio Soundboard
pre { font-size:110%; } A few months ago, one of my famous web developer co-workers had an oh-so-special bug filed against him requesting sound bites of some of his more famous sayings. He closed this bug with great success and all was well. Fast forward to today and not all is well. While we have our sound clips, they are not easily accessible; lying dormant on our hard drives and MP3 players. Well folks, today I have solved this problem. I give you the ClouserW soundboard: ... Read More »
Fun with Tooltips
A long time ago, at a far away company, I was given a project that required a not-so-usual use of tooltips. I had to implement multi-line tooltips like so: Luckily it only had to work in IE, and line breaks for tooltips in IE are just normal linebreaks in HTML, so nothing too complicated. But this got me thinking, what else is possible with tooltips? What are the limitations of tooltips? Is there any consistency between browsers? I've setup a ... Read More »
Improving Accessibility Through ARIA
Accessibility is a pretty hairy issue in web development. When attempting to determine if your site is accessible, there are so many standards and recommendations to follow. 508, WCAG, WCAG 2.0, WAI Priority 1, 2 & 3. Well, now there is a new standard from the W3C called WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) The simplest definition of ARIA is adding UI semantics via HTML element attributes. Simply, you add things like '<div role="navigation">' or '<form role="search">' to specific HTML elements to give screen readers a better understanding of your content. The ARIA spec is huge (160 pages), ... Read More »
Browser Support
For the past couple of days I've been pondering our browser support chart that the Mozilla webdev team wrote up about a year ago. Since then, the browser ecosphere has changed considerably. Chrome burst onto the scene with no warning, IE8 was released and Safari 4 is up-and-coming. One of the toughest parts of being a web developer is deciding what browser to support and how much to support each one. Should it be a binary decision, either support 100% or not? Support some browsers 100% and ... Read More »
CSS Spriting Tips
One of the most effective ways of speeding up a website's render time is to reduce the number of HTTP requests required to fetch content. An effective method to achieve this is via CSS sprites, which is combining multiple images into one large image and using CSS to only display parts of it. Here's an example sprite: The purpose of this post is not to show how it makes a site faster, but cover some best practices when creating a CSS sprite. Don't wait until you are done slicing to begin ... Read More »
