How to Make Your Blog Load Faster

The speed at which your blog loads is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it. Here are a few tips and tricks that will help your blog load faster and attract more users:

Posts
Your blog's load time can be affected by the number of posts you display on your main page. You can easily edit the number of posts displayed of the main page from the Settings | Formatting tab. You can then select the number of posts you want to display on the main page. We recommend displaying 10 or fewer posts on the main page.

Third Party JavaScript and Links
For optimal blog load speed, we recommend using Google/Blogger widgets, JavaScipt and links. However, if you need to use third party JavaScipt and links, your blog will load much faster if you put all JavaScript at the bottom of your blog. If you have third party JavaScript and links in your sidebar, put them in at the bottom of the sidebar.

Images and Media
The more images, videos and other multi-media you have on your blog the longer it will take to load. However, images and other multimedia are important to attracting users to your blog, so it is important to optimize the load speed of your images and media. Here are a few tips to increase the load speed of your media:

• Decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image.
• If you use third party images, consider uploading them to Picasa Web Albums via the Blogger post editor.
• If you have a large number of images to display, you can upload all your images (from a vacation or event) to a Picasa Web Album and link to the album in your post or sidebar.

Suggestions :

• If you've added any custom CSS to your blog, make sure you put it at the top of the page.
• The most important content of your blog that catches readers attention should load the quickest. To help you identify which items are taking the longest to load you can use Stopwatch. To use Stopwatch, enter your blog's URL into the text box and click "Start StopWatch". Stopwatch will then open your blog in a frame and will record the time it takes for everything on your blog to load, including images, videos, widgets, etc. Take note of the items that take the longest to load and modify them appropriately using our suggestions.

Source : Google Support

No Script Security Addon Moxilla Firefox

The best security you can get in a web browser! Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks. NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser.



NoScript's unique whitelist based pre-emptive script blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even not known yet!) with no loss of functionality.

Choosing the Right Social Bookmarking Widget for your Website

Social bookmarking widgets have really helped reduce clutter on web pages.

Not long ago, it was not uncommon to find bloggers putting a dozen different icons under their blog posts hoping that people would click these buttons to spread their content on the web. But as the number of social sites grew on the Internet, these numerous buttons were replaced with all-in-one widgets that not only offered more features but were easy to maintain as well.

share icon The idea is that instead of confusing your site visitors with icons of 16 different social bookmarking sites, you show them a single Share icon and they can choose the social service they want to use to save, share or bookmark your content.

The three most popular social bookmarking and sharing widgets on Internet are from Share This, Add This and Add to Any. Another service that’s relatively new but worth a mention is Tell a Friend.

Before we actually compare the features of these services, take a look at the graphic above to get some idea about the appearance of these widgets. Or you may visit this dummy page and try out any of these social sharing services.

AddThis.com

AddThis gives you complete control over the appearance and layout of the widget. You can arrange the icons in a single vertical column or put them in a horizontal strip or, if you are comfortable with CSS, you can even go for more complex hover animations.

In addition to sharing your web pages on social networks, your site visitors can also use the AddThis widget to print content or for adding the page to their browser bookmarks.

AddThis provides several analytics reports so you know what content is getting shared and what social services are most popular among your visitors. And there’s an option to add your brand name to the widget as well.

Almost every US government website (include the Whitehouse blog) uses AddThis for social sharing.

ShareThis.com

One of the unique points about the ShareThis widget is that remembers what you share. That means if you vote for a story on Digg or share a link on Twitter or stumble some page, the service will auto-save a log of all this activity into your ShareThis account. The sharing widget is available as a bookmarklet as well and this is handy for browsers like Google Chrome that don’t support add-ons.

On the publisher side, ShareThis is the only service that will allow you site visitors to share content through SMS text messages in addition to email and AIM. Though the default look of the ShareThis widget cannot be changed, you can choose which social services should be available inside the widget and their display order.

Like AddThis, ShareThis too provides detailed analytics so you can find out what people are sharing and how.

AddToAny.com

There are at least 50 different social networks and bookmarking websites on the Internet so how do you decide services that should be included in the sharing widget on your website? For instance, delicious is the most popular bookmarking service but some of your visitors could also be using Diigo or Mister-Wong so what do you do in this case? Show them both or toss a coin and pick one?

Well, the AddToAny button provides an excellent solution to this very problem. The service automatically detects social services that your visitors use and places them first in the widget. The detection mechanism is pretty good and I guess it does this by reading the browser history of visitors.

Another advantage of AddToAny is that it automatically uses your Google Analytics account for reporting. That means if you have the Google Analytics code on a page that also uses the Add To Any widget, the sharing statistics of that page will be collected just like your other Analytics data.

The layout of the Add To Any widget isn’t customizable though advanced users can hide individual tabs or even change the color scheme using CSS hacks.

Tell-A-Friend.com

With Tell-a-Friend, your site visitors can share your content with their IM buddies on Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL and MSN/Windows Live Messenger. You can rearrange the tab order in the widget and also choose which social services should be part of the individual tabs. The service also offers a paid option incase you like to brand the widget and email message with a custom logo.

For some reason, the TAF widget on the dummy page isn’t working in IE 8 or Firefox 3.5 but I used the one on NDTV.com and their email sharing feature is pretty impressive.

Here’s what I would suggest:

If you are looking to customize the widget heavily or plan to use your own social bookmarking icons so that the widget on your site looks a bit different from the rest, AddThis is a perfect choice.

If you want to offer readers an option to share content via text messages or need a widget that is extremely easy to setup and also looks elegant, go with ShareThis.

The Add To Any widget is again a good choice because site visitors get to see the service they frequently use right on top but the email sharing feature in this widget will open in another window.

Tell-A-Friend is the only service that offers sharing via popular instant messaging clients, the widget also includes a rich HTML email client so visitors can add notes to their shares but the free version of TAF doesn’t offer analytics and the widget UI can be a bit confusing for new users.

Source : www.labnol.org

Firefox 3.5 makes browsing faster, easier and more fun

The just-released version 3.5 of Firefox is a winner, offering significantly faster Web browsing, better tab handling, a host of interface tweaks and, like just about every other browser on the planet, a "porn mode." If you already use Firefox you'll want to upgrade right away. If you're not a Firefox user, this version represents a very good opportunity to give the browser a test run.

For many people, the browser wars are all about one thing: speed. There's no doubt that version 3.5 of Firefox is significantly faster than version 3. Pages load noticeably more quickly for a number of reasons, not least because Mozilla built a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey for this version of Firefox.

How much faster is open to debate. Mozilla says it ran the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, which measures how quickly browsers render JavaScript, on versions 2, 3 and 3.5 of Firefox, and asserts that the newest version is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3 and more than ten times as fast as Firefox 2 on the test. Other testers have reported similar results.

Of course, rendering JavaScript quickly doesn't necessarily mean that all Web pages load faster. Microsoft, for example, argues that for most Web pages, other kinds of speed-ups are more important than rendering JavaScript quickly. I'll leave that debate to Microsoft, Mozilla and other browser makers. But putting aside any speeds-and-feeds specs, I can tell you that from the user experience, Firefox 3.5 is lightning fast -- it seems to me about comparable to the recently-released Safari 4.0 for the Mac.

Fast Browsing with Aple Safari 4.0

Safari is now a serious browser for serious Windows users, and its position on Macs has been bolstered.Users of Safari 3 will be hard-pressed to not notice that the interface is completely new, with a look and feel much more in-line with the other major Webkit-based browser, Google Chrome. The browser launches with the menu bar, tab bar and status bar all hidden, presenting you with the location bar, bookmark bar and the slick Top Sites interface. Top Sites is essentially Opera's Speed Dial feature, presenting your most commonly-visited websites, with a Cover Flow-style skin. The black background, curvature and reflective window bottom make this the most professional-looking web browser around. A blue star and an upturned corner indicate that a site has been updated since your last visit to it. Tap the Edit button in the bottom left corner to remove a site or pin a site permanently to Top Sites.

Apple's big claim with Safari is that it's the fastest browser on the market, and they just might be right on that count. On an Intel Core Duo T400 ThinkPad, with 3GB of RAM and a 2.53GHz processor, we ran both Webkit's SunSpider JavaScript test and Mozilla's Dromaeo test on Firefox 3.5 Preview, Google Chrome 2 and Safari 4. Safari came out on top in Dromaeo by a long shot, but Chrome eked by in SunSpider.

Keeping in mind that although these tests are affected by background computer processes, your hardware, and other factors, Safari is definitely one of the fastest browsers out there. However, it still lacks extensions, and for many Firefox users that's enough to keep them from switching. Even Internet Explorer supports some form of extensibility with its Web Slices and Accelerators.

Safari is still a RAM-devouring beast, too. With two tabs open, one to Dromaeo and one to SunSpider, it was using a shocking amount of RAM — more than 500MB after running both tests. Google Chrome consumed about 75MB of RAM across the same two sites under the same circumstances, while Firefox required 120MB.

With about 8.5 per cent of the browser market, it's clear that Apple is positioning Safari as more than a developer's tool on Windows, and that its successes at building a faster JavaScript engine should be taken seriously even with its other drawbacks.

How to Browse The Internet More Faster

If your current Internet speed is very slow and you are living in an area where broadband connections are still not available, here are some ideas to help you download web pages faster on your computer. You may use the same tips to improve your web browsing experience on a sluggish USB modem.

1. Turn off web images, the Adobe Flash plug-in, Java Applets and JavaScript from your browser settings as these files are often the bulkiest elements of any web page.

2. Increase the size of your browser cache. If the static parts of a site (like background graphics, CSS, etc) are stored in the local cache, your browser can safely skip downloading these files when you re-visit the site in future thus improving speed.

3. Sometimes the slow DNS server of your ISP can be a bottleneck so switch to OpenDNS as it can resolve website URLs into IP addresses more quickly. If you aren’t too happy about OpenDNS redirecting your Google queries, follow this simple hack.

4. Finch can serve a light-weight version of any website in real-time that is free of all bells and whistles. For instance, the New York Times homepage with all external resources can weigh more than a MB but Finch trims down the size by 90% so the site loads more quickly on a slow web connection.

5. Flinch (mentioned at #4) is good for reading regular websites but if you just need to check the latest articles published on your favorite blogs, use BareSite. This service will automatically detect the associated feed of a website and render content quickly inside a minimalist interface.

6. The Google Transcoder service at google.com/gwt/n can split large web pages into smaller chunks that will download more quickly on your computer (or mobile phone).

7. Monitor your Internet speed to determine hours when you get the maximum download speed from the ISP. Maybe you can then change your surfing schedule a bit and browse more during these "off peak" hours.

8. You can use a text browser like Lynx or Elinks for even faster browsing. It downloads only the HTML version of web pages thus reducing the overall bandwidth required to render websites.

9. When searching for web pages on Google, you can click the "Cache" link to view the text version of a web page stored in the Google Cache. Alternatively, install this GM script as it adds a "cached text only" link near every "Cached" link on Google Search pages.

10. Move your web activities offline as far as possible. You can send & receive emails, write blogs and even read feeds in an offline environment. Also see: Save Web Pages for offline reading.

11. You can interact with websites like Flickr, Google Docs, Slideshare, etc. using simple email messages. Uploading a new document to Google Docs via email would require less bandwidth than doing it in the browser because you are avoiding a trip to the Google Docs website.

12. Applying the same logic, you may also consider using tools like Web In Mail or Email The Web as they help you browse websites via email. Just put the URL of a page (e.g., cnn.com) in the subject field of your email message and these services will send you the actual page in the reply.

13. Bookmarklets are like shortcuts to your favorite web services. You neither have to open the Gmail Inbox for composing a new email message nor do you have to visit Google Translate for translating a paragraph of text. Add relevant bookmarklets to your browser bar and reduce the number of steps required to accomplish a task.

14. Use the netstat command to determine processes, other than web browsers, that may be secretly connecting to Internet in the background. Some of these processes could be consuming precious bandwidth but you can block them using the Firewall.

15. Use URL Snooper to determine non-essential host names that a website is trying to connect while downloading a web page. You may block them in future via the hosts file or use Adblock Plus to filter out advertising banners on web pages.

16. If you don’t want to spoil your web surfing experience by stripping images and other graphic elements from a web page, get Opera Turbo. It will first fetch the requested web page on to its own server and then send it to your machine in a compressed format. Opera Turbo won’t change the layout of a web site but can lower the image resolution so that they load faster on slow Internet.

17. Change the user agent of your desktop browser to that of a mobile phone like Apple’s iPhone or Windows Mobile. This will help you browse certain web sites like Google News, WSJ, etc. much faster because they’ll serve you a light-weight and less cluttered mobile version of their sites thinking you’re on a mobile phone.