Often times we will use bash to create scripts for backing up or transfering files. A lot of times these files are transfered over a mounted network share or an external usb drive. Since these mount points are not always mounted we need to come up with a script that will detect the mount before we perform our operation. I have come up with a script that I think is simple enough that uses df and grep to detect the mount. Read more »

Yahoo’s Website Performance Rules - This is a must read if you develop websites. The author is the cheif optimization engineer for Yahoo and author of High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers, published by O’Reilly.

5 Ways to Screencast Your Linux Desktop - If you are looking to make screen casts or video tutorials on Linux make sure you check this article. Read more »

After doing some research on embedding CSS in HTML I found an interesting link. It turns out that you can embed image data into your HTML URLs. This means that image will be downloaded along with the HTML reducing the total amount of server requests. If you could do this to all of your images you could effectively have a SINGLE request to download the entire webpage contents. Read more »

Most web designers know that reduced server requests equals faster load times. I got to thinking and I was wondering why is CSS always in a seperate file from regular HTML? Usually it is in a different file because you don’t want to make a ton of changes in individual files. Rather you would want to make one change in a .css file and have it change every page of your site; however, with PHP we can embed CSS into our HTML and still have only one file to make our changes. Read more »

There are a few different states you can put your computer into when you are not using it. If you don’t run any other services that require networking I recommend turning your computer off via standby. It will essentially put your computer into a ultra low power state only using enough power to keep the current state in ram. If you have a significant amount of ram 2gb or more you can easily put your computer in and out of standby mode in a matter of seconds. Read more »

Almost all websites are now utilizing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as their main tool for website design and layout. Often times these files get large. Many programmers like to add additional tags to fix small portions of their site in CSS files rather than rewriting the CSS file. These types of CSS files over time can be come quite large. The larger the CSS file the longer our users will have to wait to load up our page. What can we do about it? We can compress CSS which allows for a much faster load time and uses less bandwidth. Read more »

I love Opera and I am excited to be using the latest version Opera 9.5 that came out just a few days ago. With the new features, fixes, and new Dragonfly Webdeveloper Tool I believe that Opera is pulling away from the competiton and has always been in my opinion faster and better than Firefox or other browsers. Read more »

CSS Compressor - A cool script that will compress your css files. Most of my files were compressed by 20% or more.

CssTidy - I found this shortly after cssdrive’s script and thought it was much better at compressing. Both of them are worth checking into. Read more »