Velocity 2010 Videos & Slides

If you find Web Performance exciting, you shouldn't miss watching the Velocity 2010 videos & slides. Velocity is an annual Web Performance and Operations conference conducted by O'Reilly Media.There are a lot of speed tips, suprising facts & interesting thoughts shared by experts. Did you know, seventy five percent of that traffic comes through third-party apps via the Twitter API rather than the Twitter.com web site? Twitter manages 700...

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Browser Usage Stats for India

As per StatCounter Global Stats, IE6 is the most popular browser in India with 26.56% users preferring it (during this year). Interestingly, Internet Explorer 6 usage has fallen to approximately 5% in US & UK. All the IE versions combined are used by 50.13% of Indian users while Firefox is the second most popular.Among social media websites, Facebook (61.59%) is the most popular in India while Twitter (6.1%) ranks fourth. Orkut is not featured...

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Tech-Ed Online Videos

The Tech-Ed Online website features recorded presentations of sessions conducted at venues around the world. There are over 1700+ videos just from TechEd North America. The entire collection of recorded presentations are spread across 19 categories -Application Integration & Interoperability Application Server & Infrastructure Architecture Business Intelligence Cloud Computing & Online ServicesDatabase...

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6 ways to filter HTTP traffic with Fiddler

I've been taking notes from Eric Lawrence's recorded presentation at MIX10 on Fiddler for future reference. This is the third part, check the earlier two tips if you haven't already read them - Track HTTP traffic in Firefox with FiddlerHookFiddlerCap makes HTTP Traffic Capture easierFiddler offers multiple ways to filter the HTTP traffic for analysis with varying degrees of granularity so that you can jump to the point of specific interest -1. Application...

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Best of Google Webmaster Help videos

Over at SEOmozBlog, Dr. Pete informs that there are 200+ Webmaster Help videos on YouTube featuring  Matt Cutts, Google's most visible anti-spam engineer. Occasionally, some Google secrets slip out during these videos. He watched 70 of the videos posted in 2010 & gathered some unusual facts.  Excerpts -Google does not use the keywords meta tag for ranking. Meta description still has value for other reasonsCross-linking 3 sites probably...

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Google Search Operators

Google gets you results fast but if you are searching for something complex, how do you frame your input to Google so that you can relevant results immediately?If you haven't already tried, you should read up on search operators & take advantage of it.Google supports several advanced operators, which are query words that have special meaning to Google. Typically these operators modify the search in some way, or even tell Google to do a totally different type of search. For instance, "link:" is a special operator, and the query [link:www.google.com]...

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HOW TO choose a webcam

This excerpt from David A. Karp's Windows 7 Annoyances has tips on features to look for while buying a webcam. Here is a paraphrased list -High frame rate (for smooth, blur-free video)Motorized face tracking enables video chat without having to sit perfectly stillLook for UVC (USB Video device Class) compliance as such a webcam can work on a variety of operating systems without any special drivers. Pick a known brand name (like Logitech, Creative...

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Look what Google Goggles visual search can do

Google Goggles is a visual search application available currently for Android powered phones. It may possibly be available for phones of other platforms in the future.You can take a photo of a book with a Android phone & Google Goggles will show you search results pertaining to that. So an image acts a keyword for Google Goggles.It can scan a business card, extract information from it & store contact details on your phone automatically. It...

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Check out O'Reilly Answers

The website currently in beta describes itself as a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). To me, O'Reilly Answers looks like a cross between Stack Overflow & LinkedIn Answers. The nice thing about it is that you can get to interact with O'Reilly authors & earn points for participating that can be redeemed for books, training, courses, and conferences.40...

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Learning Windows Phone Programming - Preview Chapters

If you are getting started with Windows Phone 7 development, you can check two preview chapters from the book Learning Windows Phone Programming being written by two Microsoft folks Yochay Kiriaty and Jaime Rodriguez. On the book's dedicated website, the authors specify their objective -"Our goal for the book is to share an insider view into Windows Phone. We want to share the insights from the product team, and lessons learned from the very early...

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FiddlerCap makes HTTP Traffic Capture easier

As a web developer, if you would like to debug HTTP traffic of web pages that your site users are having problem with, you can have the end-users record the traffic details as a Session Archive Zip (.SAZ) file & then send it to you.Talking about Traffic Import options with Fiddler in his session titled "Advanced Web Debugging with Fiddler" at MIX10, Eric Lawrence highlights a lesser known tool called FiddlerCap. For non-technical folks, FiddlerCap...

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Track HTTP traffic in Firefox with FiddlerHook

Eric Lawrence, the creator of Fiddler (his side project since 8 years) & an Internet Explorer Program Manager at MS, presented an interesting session titled "Advanced Web Debugging with Fiddler" at MIX10. I have gone through the half-hour breezy presentation and also downloaded it (.WMV version is 68.2MB) so that I can watch it again to digest & try out the many tips discussed in it. I plan to blog about the tips that Eric shared in his presentation...

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Sitepoint CSS Video Tutorials Giveaway

Sitepoint is giving away the video tutorials of it's CSS Crash Course. The offer ends today so grab those videos right away.They take your email address to send you the Order Id which you'll need before you can start downloading. In case, you have trouble logging in with the email address & Order Id credentials, write to their Customer Support.Here's what's in the nearly two and half hour tutorial -An Introduction to CSS (17:40)Videos 1 &...

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Get ready for HTML5

The upcoming versions of all browsers are busy implementing HTML5 features. Chrome & Safari 4 already have lead over the rest. Some of the most notable new additions in HTML5 are the video tag that will let videos to be displayed directly in the browser without having to rely on plugins and Offline Storage. YouTube has a preview of it's HTML5 Video Player.Web developers can benefit from proactively understanding & planning on incorporating HTML5 features in their websites. There are some good learning resources online for HTML5 -W3Schools...

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Save time while typing with PhraseExpress

PhraseExpress is a free utility that saves the time spent typing with features like Autotext, Auto-complete (found in MS Word), Text Suggestion etc. It integrates with Windows applications (like Notepad, WordPad, Office applications, browsers) & kicks in from the System tray whenever user starts typing.The mobile phone text input T9-like predictive text feature is present in the paid versions of the tool.One of the product's touted benefits is...

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Browser UI features are getting consistent

Cross-browser issues are caused by  browsers not complying with W3C standards while rendering pages. Increasingly however the browser UI features are getting consistent. If a particular browser brings out an innovative feature that is lapped up by users, chances are the rest of the browsers would implement it too. Here are some examples -Pop-up blockers - At the height of the pesky pop-up window scourge inflicted by unscrupulous webmasters for...

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Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools

 If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it - Lord KelvinThere are a bunch of free Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools that web developers can take advantage of to build blazing fast web pages -Page Speed - open source Firebug pluginYSlow  - Firebug plugin from YahooAOL Pagetest - appears under the Tools menu in Internet Explorer after installation. Online version of Pagetest also provides Optimization Report.Zoompf...

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Middle-click mouse to open link in new browser tab

It came as a nice surprise to me that clicking the scroll wheel in between the right & left mouse buttons while positioned on a link can open that in a new tab. I found this feature working on all the popular browsers - IE (version 8), Firefox (version 3), Opera (version 9.6), Safari on Windows (version 4) & Chrome (version 5)Also see:HOW to continuously refresh any web-page in IE8 & Firefo...

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HOW TO measure page load times across continents for free

How quickly users can view your web pages depends on a variety of factors like the browser they are using (newer browsers can download page elements concurrently & faster), their Internet connection speed, where the web server hosting the site is located (results in lesser hops) , size of the browser cache.The freeware Fiddler which can be used to debug HTTP traffic provides very rough estimates of download times of any page element for different...

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HOW TO extract only specific files from a .ZIP using C#

"Well, it's better to be silent than to be a fool." - Harper LeeOnline Forums are a great place to learn new tricks.I learnt today that DotNetZip is an open source class library and toolset for manipulating zip files or folders that's easier to use than the other popular library SharpZipLib. Built by Dino Chiesa, it is hosted on CodePlex and has extensive documentation & samples. It takes just a few lines & the ZipFile.ExtractSelectedEntries Method to filter specific files from a zipped file using a selection criteria expression.Talking...

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