Great tip on serving compressed CSS and Java Script files from Amazon S3

Fantastic performance tip on hosting compressed CSS and javascipt file from Amazon S3:

"Typically, I use a tool called Juicer ( http://github.com/cjohansen/juicer) to concatenate and compress my CSS and JavaScript files (with YUI Compressor and Google Closure Compiler, respectively) to ensure they're as small as possible and require the fewest number of HTTP requests ( http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#num_http).

After that, I launch Terminal and run `gzip -9 filename.css && gzip -9 filename.js` to compress them as tightly as possible. This will give me filename.css.gz and filename.js.gz. I remove the .gz extension, and upload those files to S3.

Lastly, I add a custom HTTP header — `Content-Encoding: gzip` — to each of the files in S3. This tells the browser the same thing as Apache would if it were compressing them on the fly. The browser then knows to decompress the content after downloading it.

Since the files are pre-compressed instead of compressing on the fly (a la Apache), fewer server resources are used and the response times are faster. "



Original source: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=194918&tstart=0#194918

Last day on the 3M VAS project

Today marks my last official day on the 3M VAS project (http://vas.3m.com).  It's been fun getting to develop a production site for a major company with Silverlight 4 and Azure!

Mike Hodnick, one of my colleagues on the development team has a nice wrap up post about the project on his blog:  http://hodnick.com/post/1121185443/vas3m

(Just to be clear: 3M VAS is very much alive and well.  This is just the end of a major release cycle and most of the development team is moving on to other projects.)

Moving to Google Voice as my primary public phone number

I've been playing around with Google Voice for a while know and I really like the speech to text transcription it does on voicemails, and so I've decided to start using it as my primary phone number for all business stuff.

Interesting to note how much Google and Amazon cloud stuff I use in my day to day life... and nothing from Microsoft... hmmm...