So you’ve replaced with Apache with Nginx, or put Varnish out in front of your main webserver. Or maybe you just spent time converting all your main site images to CSS Data URLs. Either way, you’re now ready to taste the fruits of your work via speed tests. Here are some of the best resources for doing that.

1. Google Page Speed Online | Google
   This is a brand-new service from Google that replicates it’s Page Speed service in online form. It’s focus is not on displaying a visual of the response, but rather on giving recommendations on how to improve speed.

2. Site-perf.com | Site Performance
   This site is very responsive and lets you test from a few different servers — two in the U.S. and two overseas.

3. Websiteoptimization.com | Website Optimization
   This service (and it’s accompanying documentation and guidance around optimization) is one of the best at giving recommendations on what to fix.

4. Whichloadsfaster.com | Which Site Loads Faster?
   This site allows you to compare your site against another to see which loads faster. It also lets you do multiple tests in a row to get a better baseline. Hint: if you load faster than Google’s front page then you’re doing well.

5. tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ | Pingdom Load Time Test
   Pingdom’s test service is perhaps the cleanest in terms of presentation. I find myself using this one quite often.
   

6. Browser Load Time Stopwatch | LifeHacker
   This is also one of my most-used options for testing speed. It’s different than the others because it’s not a web page, but rather a piece of JavaScript that runs. You add the link to your bookmarks and execute it to test the page you’re currently on.

7. Google Chrome Page Speed | Extension
   The Page Speed chrome extension is phenomenal for getting results that look like a local application in terms of detail and presentation.

8. Google Chrome Developer Tools | Built-in Tool
   Many don’t realize that Google Chrome has a wicked-powerful set of tools built in. By opening the tools from the options menu you not only have the classics that let you manipulate JavaScript, see page layout, etc., but you also have a network display that lets you see what took the longest to load. It’s like a mini Page Speed display without the extension.

9. YSlow | Browser Extension
   YSlow is like Google’s Page Speed, only not quite as advanced and available for more platforms. It’s now available for Chrome as well.

10. webpagetest.org | Web Page Test
    This is another very solid web-based test that gives extremely detailed output with regard to what the request looked like from the browser.

11. Google Analytics | Google
    It’s now possible to track load speed through Google Analytics. Simply get the latest version of the tracking script that has the functionality in it, and you’ll see it as an option within your metrics.

12. Google’s Webmaster Tools
    Google’s Webmaster Tools has a Page Speed menu under Labs that shows you how fast your various pages have been loading. The options is very beta, however, as it gives you no control over what to test and not much information on what has been tested.

13. Pingdom’s Web Monitoring Service
    This offering doesn’t test on demand like the others, but rather is an ongoing service that continuously tests pages that you define to let you know how their responsiveness changes over time. It’s very helpful for noticing how various techniques, like CloudFlare or Varnish, improve site load times. And since their servers are located all over the world, you get to see how fast your site loads from different countries as well.

14. Blitz.io. It is a real-deal traffic simulation platform.

If you know of any I should add to this list, let me know.

[ UPDATE: Yes, I know I'm over ten options now...but it's too late to change the title. :) ]

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I made a couple of changes to the site today and I’m curious as to whether anyone can notice a speed difference — either positive or negative.

I’ve taken Amazon out of the loop and put CloudFlare back inline, so the content is coming from me directly, but being cached by CloudFlare. This is in contrast to CloudFlare fetching my content from Amazon S3 and then caching it.

So it’s basically just taking one step out of the process. Let me know if you see any change.

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Ok, so the feeds are back up and running with the proper URL (feeds.danielmiessler.com/danielmiessler)

Even if you didn’t experience any issues, please do me a favor and make sure you’re subscribed to the following address and not any other:

http://feeds.danielmiessler.com/danielmiessler

Thanks.

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In case you haven’t noticed already, the feeds for the site are borked right now. I’m doing some account Google consolidation and my feedburner properties were a casualty.

I’m working on getting them re-established, but it could be a bit. Sorry for the annoyance.

I’ve finally done a refresh on my /study page, meaning that I have added many new entries that weren’t there before as well as updated the formatting to the new CSS.

I’ve not yet updated the RSS feed (I have to do it manually, ugh), but I’ll be doing so soon.

Let me know what you guys think. Is it approachable? Is the CSS inviting enough? Etc.

Thanks.

Image from complexification.net

I’ve been coming repeatedly to a simple conclusion regarding content creation and the use of social services:

If something is worth creating, it’s worth keeping within your own control.

This includes quick little comments on the world, or sharing interesting links (Twitter), to posting and sharing content through something like Google+. I’ve been blogging since 1999, so I have over 5,000 posts saved within mysql, but what about Twitter? Where did those 3,000 posts go? Was any of it worth saving? Why did I put it there and not on my site?

To me it’s quite simple: if it’s worth sharing then it’s good enough for me to feel bad about not having permanently as part of my digital avatar. And if it’s not good enough for that, then maybe I shouldn’t be creating/sharing it in the first place.

The concept of some content being on Twitter, some content being on Facebook, and some content being in Google+ is basically the approach of someone who is not taking what they produce seriously. After five years of doing this, what will you have? And after 20? What history will there be of your experiences and/or contributions?

In 20 years, your Foursquare check-ins, your silly jokes, your poignant observations, your best-find articles, your own deeper thoughts — they will matter to you. Some of it will matter because it will be a history of who you were and what you were doing, but some will matter because the content itself was good.

If the answer is, “I’m not trying to make “contributions”, you uppity fool, I’m just having fun…”, then you now know why I don’t read anything you write, and why nobody else does either. If you don’t take what you produce seriously, why should anyone else? And please don’t confuse seriousness with a lack of silliness or humor — most of the funniest and silliest people you’ll find online take their output very seriously.

Quite simply, if you care about what you put on Twitter, Google+, or other disparate services, consider the possibility that you should be capturing and centralizing that content somewhere that you control, e.g. your own site, or a single trustworthy service that you can reliably export from.

All this content represents who you were and what you did. You’ll want it later. Start now. ::

My web configuration makes use of Varnish as a front-end, and I noticed a bug recently where asking for “/study” was failing, while asking for “/study/” would succeed.

But when I moved Varnish out of the way, Nginx handled this without issue.

So I set out to figure out a recipe for adding the trailing slash within Varnish. The following solution works for me, but if you know a better way do let me know.

# If the requested URL contains $directory and doesn’t contain index.php, add a trailing slash to the end.

sub vcl_recv {
if ((req.url ~ "/directory" ) && (! (req.url ~ "index.php"))){
   set req.url = req.url "/";
}
}

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I’ve spend significant time optimizing my site for speed. It’s true that Google favors sites that are fast, but I do it because I hate waste, and I find it enjoyable to optimize things.

The yield from this effort is that I now average ~200ms load times for my WordPress content. In short, my site is fast, and I get a lot of questions and comments on how I get this kind of speed, so here’s my setup:

1. I run highly optimized markup. I wrote my theme myself (it’s the same for my WordPress and custom content), and it’s focused on simplicity and speed.
2. I use inline CSS data to serve my core site images. So, once you pull my CSS you have my logo image and every other image you see in my core template. And that’s cached, so you only get it once. Everything pops after that.
3. I run Nginx instead of Apache. It’s attacked less, extremely lightweight, and very fast.
4. I compress and cache the hell out of everything using nginx.
5. I run Varnish as a front-end to Nginx, which gives wicked fast response times. Basically, it serves your entire site as static files–out of memory.
6. I use CloudFlare, which sits in front of all of this, caches my images and CSS and serves them from local distribution points worldwide, and fields all of my junk traffic such as bots and low-level web attacks.

The results have their own voice.

[ In addition to speed, this configuration allows me to take significant traffic while barely noticing. I've been on the front page of Reddit and Hacker News a number of times using this configuration, and my server giggled slightly. ]

So yeah, this config is rockin’, but I am always looking to improve. Hit me up with questions, comments, and ways you think I can optimize. I love to hear from fellow optimizers.

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I’ll take that. ::