Magicology

In this post, I’ll show you some of the mistakes and poor markup practices I often see and explain how to avoid them.

Nicholas Zakas is a Javascript guru and principle front-end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage. Zakas just announced his new book High Performance JavaScript, which you should order today.

Zakas is pretty much the man when it comes to Javascript performance, and in June he gave a Google Tech Talk entitled Speed Up Your Javascript.

While Javascript optimization is by no means black-and-white, here’s a list of 10 tips from Nicholas’ talk that will help you write Javascript that really flies.

One of the most overlooked new features of HTML5 is Microdata. Microdata allows us to more specifically categorize and label our web content in a machine-readable way. Why this is important is because it may positively affect your search results.

One of the more persistent issues is dealing with images. Resizing an image down to fit a smaller screen does work, but it’s a massive performance hit if your user is having to download a 1000px image to display on her 480px screen. Even if they’re on a super-fast WiFi connection, it makes no sense downloading 1000s of pixels if you can only display a fraction of that.

There have been several solutions posted and proposed around the internet but I’ve come up with a pretty humble one that you could use right away.

It didn’t work out as you expected, did it? The freelance life was supposed to give you more time with the family and free you from that incompetent boss. You even thought you might be better off financially. Instead, you’re working longer hours and under constant stress, worrying about various aspects of your business.

To relieve the pressure of entrepreneurial life and avoid burning out, freelancers and business owners need strategies. In this post, I’ll share some tactics that have helped me be more in control of my business, my projects and life in general. I hope they help you, too.

Let’s begin by putting some solid plans in place.