What I Read in 2009

For 2009, I decided to start actively reading again (something I had done very little of since high school). I managed to get through 38 books and while I'm not exactly setting a goal, I'd like to at least maintain a similar pace this year.

If you just want the highlights, I'd say that Neverwhere, Replay and The Road are at the top of my list as far as fiction is concerned. For non-fiction, Brain Rules, Blink and Trade-Off probably top the list.

Performance Optimization Made Quick and Simple

Optimizing your site's performance doesn't have to be very difficult. Take this site for example. Typically, I take care of optimization as part of the build process. However, for the sake of demonstration, I thought this time around I'd take care of each step by itself, using freely available tools where applicable.

First off was setting expires tags and turning gzipping on. Since I've done this in too many .htaccess files to count, this was simply a copy/paste job with very little tweaking necessary.

Changing Things Up

After a very long, drawn out design/build process, I finally decided to just get it over with and push the new design live (as anyone not reading this in their RSS reader can see). There's a few bits of code and a little bit of styling I've not quite fine-tuned yet, but if I keep waiting, the design would never get put up. As it is, it's been sitting on my computer in virtually the same state it appears now for the last month or so without being touched.

In addition to a new look, the underlying code has changed. I used to blog on a home-brewed VBScript based system. This incarnation of the blog, however, is built on Wordpress. It's also built using HTML5 and makes use of some CSS3 selectors for presentation. The idea was to simplify the publishing process to encourage more writing, and as part of that, I also wanted to simplify the look a little bit. Using HTML5 and CSS3 just give me an excuse to play around with those technologies a bit.