Christian Heilmann

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Archive for January, 2009

People I’d like to see on stage more: Nicole Sullivan

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

This is a new series of posts I am starting, tying in with things I’ve been saying in presentations and at interviews lately: I think it is time we mixed the speaker circuit up a bit and hear from different people than the “rock stars” of web development.

In this series I will talk about people I very much enjoy following and had great experiences witnessing as presenters or colleagues. Hopefully it’ll inspire some conference organizers to consider them and you to have a lookout for them.

First up is Nicole Sullivan, which is the name of her real life mild-mannered self.

On the web she is known as Stubbornella and writes a lot about performance, image optimization, CSS maintenance and other things that are both highly technical and very related to the grey area of web development that is the blurry border between design and engineering.

nicole sullivan

Nicole is right now writing on a book about image optimisation together with Stoyan Stefanov one of her partners in battling those extra bytes clogging the web. Together they built Smushit, a ridiculously useful tool to optimize your images without changing their visual quality. She used to work in Yahoo in the exceptional performance team and was a large part of the research team that brought the best practices for images and CSS when it comes to performance.

Nicole gives presentations both in English and French and has a wonderfully pragmatic approach to her work. While a lot of performance presentations can be highly technical, academic or deal with edge cases, Nicole keeps her “down in the trenches web developer” hat firmly on that curly head of hers and gives advice you can use immediately and get a result for your sites. Want proof? Check out this video of her speaking at the internal Yahoo developer summit:


Nicole Sullivan: "Design Fast Websites" @ Yahoo! Video

I’ve seen Nicole several times, been with her at Paris Web and The Ajax Experience and can safely say it’ll be cool to have her share her wisdom with more people out there.

TweetEffect – find out when people followed or left you on Twitter

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

I’ve just finished uploading and fixing TweetEffect a web app that allows you to check which of your latest http://twitter.com updates resulted in people following or leaving you:

TweetEffect Screenshot

With the demise of Qwitter there was no real update mechanism to know when you lost followers, this might be a step to fill this gap. TweetEffect does not tell you who left you, only the number of people. The reason is the draconic rate limiting of Twitter. This is also the reason why the app largely runs in JavaScript and only does checks server-side when you provide a user ID on the URL. This allows for bookmarking and sharing with others.

Check out some examples:

What do you think? Anything else to add?

Displaying useful tweets on your blog (second version using YQL)

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Back in September I showed a solution how to display filtered tweets on your blog using Yahoo Pipes which is in use on this page in the sidebar on the right.

There were a few issues with it: the data returned was pretty big and slowed down the page (yeah I could delay this after page load, but size down the wire is size down the wire) and I only used the last 20 updates, which – with my twitter pace – meant that a lot of times there wasn’t any ‘blogworthy’ tweet available any longer.

So, I dug around and realized that instead of analyzing the RSS feed of your tweets it makes much more sense to use the API, in detail the user timeline which allows me to get up to 200 of the latest tweets using the count parameter.

This is awesome, however, as the API repeats all my information in every status (I guess to cover changes, like location) the result can get very large, right now for example the JSON output of my twitter updates is 120KB – not good.

By using YQL I can easily cut this down to the bare necessities using the following command:

select status.text from xml where url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/codepo8.xml?count=200' and status.text like '%§%'

Using this with JSON output and wrapper I only get the updates I need as a 1.2KB large JavaScript file!

The HTML and JavaScript solution doesn’t change much:




Now I got a faster useful tweets badge with information that stays longer. Easy.

TTMMHTM: Plane rescue, useless super powers, clipboard hack

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Things that made me happy this morning:

TTMMHTM: API updates, YDN Tuesdays, YUI on GitHub and good vibes

Thursday, January 15th, 2009