Category5 Technology TV - Making Your Web Site Faster with Cloud-Based JavaScript Hosting

Making Your Web Site Faster with Cloud-Based JavaScript Hosting

S06E35
May 21, 2013

Robbie and Christa show you how simply changing your JavaScript hosting from your own server to "the cloud" will noticeably speed up your web site.

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This episode is sponsored in part by: netTALK DUO, Netflix, Eco Alkalines.

Topics Covered:

Robbie Ferguson and Christa Wells present from the Category5 studios in Barrie, Ontario.
Our Mobile Web Site has been upgraded to support more mobile devices during the live show, with both live video and audio feeds.
Category5.TV now has individual photo galleries on episode show notes pages.
{play 5:51}Feature: Make your web site faster by hosting your JavaScript in "the cloud" with CDNJS.
- Making your web site load fast is very important.
- "The Cloud" (Content Distribution Networks) allow you to tap into an infrastructure much more powerful (and faster) than your own web server.
- Robbie uses fancyBox as a good example code to test performance on our own server vs hosting JavaScript via CDNJS.
- Using GTmetrix to test the speed and performance of your web site.
- For the demonstration, Robbie uses a normal Fancybox Installation and a copy optimized with CDNJS.
- What JavaScript is and how we're able to speed up its loadtime without compromizing anything.
- Comparing the versatility of Google Hosted Libraries to that of CDNJS. For an interesting test (and its results), visit Robbie's Blog about Google vs. CDNJS for jQuery.
- Obtaining the CDNJS copy of the JavaScript, CSS and even images for your site's JavaScript code.
- Understanding the file naming (eg, .js vs .min.js) on CDNJS and making your selection.
- Why CDNJS uses // instead of http:// or https://.
- Using GTmetrix to compare two web sites, or two versions of the same web site.
- Simply adding the use of CDNJS has reduced our demo web page's load time by ~2/3.
- Browser Caching across multiple sites makes CDNJS libraries perform even faster.
{play 28:06}Top Stories from the Category5.TV Newsroom
{play 36:40}Viewer Questions
Viewer Comment: I just watched the nostalgic gamer episode, and did it ever bring back memories! The first game I played at home was Forbidden Forest on the VIC-20. Interesting note about the cassette decks is that they were actually 300 baud modems.
Viewer Question: In Episode 266 you answered a viewer question about editing your fstab file to mount a NAS over SMBFS on Linux. Since upgrading to Debian 7, it no longer works for me since Debian says SMBFS is no longer supported. How can I get this working again on my Debian 7 system?
- Installing cifs-utils on Linux.
- Editing your /etc/fstab file to support a cifs mountpoint as per the previous lesson using SMBFS.
- Some advantages of CIFS over SMBFS.
- Using the mount -a command to test your /etc/fstab file without rebooting.
{play 44:28}Viewer Comment: To followup to my question from Episode 295, I have not had any luck getting Steam to work on Point Linux 64-bit, but also I haven't been able to get Evolution working. So I've switched back to Zorin OS.
- Evolution is a free alternative to Microsoft Outlook for Linux.
- Installing Evolution from within Synaptic Package Manager on Point Linux.
A word of advice for Eric: If you visit Australia, don't say "d'day mate"... it'll make you look like a tourist.
{play 51:16}A clever phishing scam, seemingly from LogMeIn, arrived in the Category5 inbox.
Viewer Comment: I have a problem with sshfs. When I mount my 2TB drive, it reports the wrong amount of space, so when I copy large files it says it is out of space.
Viewer Question: How do you make a group in Linux without a GUI?
- Note: We were running out of time when this question came in, but the command, as super user, is: groupadd