alldigitalmoves’s posterous

www.twine.com/item/12m2q2n6h-37d/marshalsandler-com-and-now-the-net-neutrality-fight-starts-for-real
2 days ago - by marshal sandler on google_blog

API Showcase: reBlog on Brinkwire

Posted by jure, under API showcase on August 27th, 2009

Brinkwire is a news hub for blogs, online communities, content affiliates, publishers and members of the connected internet who are interested in commercial news. Today they’ve added another feature to their page that enables even easier spreading of news about new products and services – reBlog integration.
This way anyone with a blog can quickly quote [...]

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Featured user: Marshal Sandler | Zemanta Ltd.

Marshal Sandler is one of our most loyal users and probably also the oldest. We’re honored to have him follow our work and for his comments and links that he’s sending in our ...

• www.zemanta.com/blog/featured-user-marshal-sandler

Timing is everything. Making “amazing” look easy isn’t just about talent and practice, it’s about being in tune with the environment. The surfers that really wow us and capture our attention repeatedly when the big waves come aren’t just getting in the water more than average, they’re watching weather patterns, studying the beach and trying to anticipate where the perfect break will be so that they can position themselves in just the right spot to get the best ride when the conditions are right. From the beach, seeing a great surfer catch that perfect wave seems effortless…but only because they were in the right place at the right time and were paddling like hell when they saw the wave coming.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/knmurphy/3827402016/sizes/m/

This post was written by Steffan Antonas. Find more at blog.steffanantonas.com

Image by cloud_nine via Flickr

A few months ago we have started an exit survey to figure out why some people uninstall Zemanta Firefox extension (as inexplicable as it sounds to us, it does happen . To our surprise users were willing to share their view and help us improve Zemanta experience.

Substantial number of responders commented that Zemanta slows down their writing experience since it loads later than the rest of their blogging dashboard and even confuses them by springing into life after they already start to write.

We dug in and tried to figure out what is going on. We knew that we can’t load instantly due to the mechanics of extending the dashboard, but we were still astonished by what we found: Sometimes it took us a few seconds before we’d start loading and much more before we finished! So we devised the plan and went to work.

We discovered:

• Zemanta was loading multiple javascript and CSS files from Amazon S3 hosting. It can easily take 200 to 300ms per file to be downloaded.
• Fetch of user’s customized preferences from server took a second
• Afterwards we did a search on Flickr for interesting initial photos which could also take from half a second to a second
• And lastly we downloaded a file containing ‘inspirational articles’ that show up before you write any text.

We addressed all of the above. Now we are happy to report that Zemanta loads in 0.3 – 0.5 seconds. This should be negligible for most users. We spent first week of September on these optimizations and then released them one by one after they passed quality control. The last one was the upgrade of Firefox extension to version 0.6.2.

What did we do?

• We merged all javascript files into one, and all CSS files into one
• We moved hosting from Amazon S3 to Amazon CloudFront, the proper content distribution network – difference was amazing, now those files take 30ms to load
• We implemented user-side caching of user preferences in both Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions. This reduces time to fetch preferences to zero after first load
• We created central ‘defaults’ file that is updated every hour and holds both Flickr images list and related articles that are shown for inspiration before you start writing. Loading of this file is substantially faster than calling Flickr on every Zemanta load.

So all this delivered faster, better & uncut Zemanta to our bloggers! If you have issues that annoy you when using Zemanta, please do let us know! We are listening at support@zemanta.com!

Related articles by Zemanta

• New Zemanta Firefox extension – 0.6 (zemanta.com)
• Speed up Firefox by cleaning out your SQLite databases (downloadsquad.com)
• Vladimir Vukicevic: To Sprite Or Not To Sprite (vlad1.com)

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