For the past few weeks, I have been taking a look at different blogging platforms such as SubText and BlogEngine.NET. We currently run on SubText (which is what you are probably seeing at the moment) and we really enjoy it. There's just one down side: we can't have multiple authors on the same blog! We really have needed that functionality since we started blogging over a year ago. As of now, we are going to use BlogEngine.NET as a little experiment. We might go back to SubText, I'm not quite sure. BlogEngine.NET has it's up sides, and it's down sides. But so does SubText. I guess we'll see how this all plays out :)
The other aspect of my last few week's work is performance. I don't think I've every been very much of a performance freak, but I defiantly see a difference a few things can make! One of our goals with this website is to be XHTML 1.0 Traditional valid on EVERY PAGE. I think that should help us out on our quest for performance. The three other big things we had to do is:
- Add Expired headers to every page, script, and StyleSheet (to reduce the number of HTTP requests to the server)
- GZIP EVERYTHING
- Add a JavaScript and CSS minifier engine
The result is a 96% on the YSLOW! I don't think I have ever seen an ASP.NET application get above a 70%... so this sort of excites me!
You can see the performance things they measure from this URL: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
If you will notice, we get a C in the CDN category. Honestly, this really isn't fair of Yahoo! to ask of people. Most websites don't have the cash to buy a Content Delivery Network. In some cases, it can even slow down your website. So, 96 is good enough for me!
Hopefully our viewers and web traffic will notice the difference from our previous site, which had a performance rating of 60 and wasn't XTHML Valid, compared to our new site that should load faster and look much cleaner.
In the next few days, I'll start to talk about JavaScript and give a glimpse as to what we are going to do with it.