A decade of working in the Web performance industry can leave one with the idea that no matter how good a site is, there is always the opportunity to be better, be faster. However, I am beginning to believe, just from my personal experience on the Internet, that speed has reached its peak with the current technologies we have.

This does not bode well for an Internet that is shifting more directly to true read/write, data/interaction heavy Web sites. This needs to have home broadband that is not only fast, but which has equality for inbound and outbound connection speeds.

But will faster home broadband really make that much of a difference? Or will faster networks just show that even with the best connectivity to the Internet money can buy, Web sites are actually hurting themselves with poor design and inefficient data interaction designs?

For companies on the edge of Web performance, who are trying to push their ability to improve the customer experience as hard as possible, who are moving hard and fast to the read/write web, here are some ways you can ensure that you can still deliver the customer experience your vistors expect.

Confirm your customers’ bandwidth

This is pretty easy. Most reasonably powerful Web analytics tools can confirm this for you, breaking it down by dialup, and high broadband type. It’s a great way to ensure that your preconceptions about how your customers interact with your Web site meets the reality of their world.

It is also a way to see just how unbalanced your customers’ inbound and outbound connection speeds. If it is clear that traffic is coming from connection types or broadband providers that are heavily weighted towards download, then optimization exercises cannot ignore the effect of data uploads on the customer experience.

Design for customers’ bandwidth

Now that you’ve confirmed the structure of your customers’ bandwidth, ensure that your site and data interaction design are designed with this in mind. Data that uses a number of inefficient data calls behind the scenes in order to be more AJAXy may hurt itself when it tries to make those calls over a network that’s optimized for download and not upload.

Measure from the customer perspective

Web performance measurement has been around a long time. But understanding how the site performs from the perspective of true (not simulated) customer connectivity, right where they live and work, will highlight how your optimizations may or may not be working as expected.

Measurements from high-throughput, high-quality datacenter connections give you some insight into performance under the best possible circumstances. Measure from the customer’s desktop, and even the most thoughtfully planned optimization efforts may have been like attacking a mammoth with a closed safety pin: ineffective and it annoys the mammoth [to paraphrase Hugh Macleod].

As well as synthetic measurements, measure performance right from within the browser. Understanding how long it takes pages to render, how long it takes to show content above the fold, and to gather discrete times on complex Flash and AJAX events within the page will give you even more control over finding those things you can fix.

Takeaway

In the end, even assuming your customers have the best connectivity, and you have taken all the necessary precautions to get Web performance right, don’t assume that the technology can save you from bad design and slow applications.

Be constantly vigilant. And measure everything.

The call came this morning.

It really wasn’t unexpected. Whenever I get one of those rare calls from my mother, I half expected the reason was to tell me that he had passed. It’s that aching feeling of tension that the ringing phone was going to tell me that he was gone.

My grandfather and I were from very different worlds. He spent too much of his life underground. His knees, shoulders, hearing all showed that.

His world was experienced through the muscles, the bones. His world was wrenched from the earth, shaped by his hands, pulled from the grime of machines. It was a world of men, a world that is as incomprehensible to me as mine was to him.

I knew he was a ladies man. You know the one: Dashing, attractive with a strong temper and a brooding, unpredictable temperament. The man of mystery that all ladies ask about.

He was faithful to one woman, my grandmother, until the day she died. Their relationship was a war between personalities, that explosive combination of friction and passion that made it one of the strongest bonds I have ever seen.

He mourned her until the day he died. Whenever I visited, the discussion eventually drifted around to his Nettie. That distant look came over his failing blue eyes, the panorama of memory clearly playing on his face.

My grandfather and I shared one thing: The powerful mood swings that were fueled by the same catastrophic failure of our brains to handle the world in a reasonable way.

I found peace through medication. Grandpa started with the numbing power of rye to help take the edge of his mental anguish. And when he was forced to make a choice between the drink and his life, he chose his life and left the drink behind.

He took the restless energy that drove him to drink and channeled it into the furniture he restored.

People from far and wide brought him pieces that were lost, beaten, destroyed. In his hands, their inner beauty was exposed.

Each piece of furniture was a piece of his life that he was atoning for. A mistake that he was trying to repair. A memory he was sharing. Those memories are scattered now, among family, friends, strangers. And with each memory shared, he ensured that he would live on.

His best gift to me was to help me realize that the mistakes of youth can be restored, repaired, but memory reminds us that they can never be undone.

I miss you grandpa. Travel in peace.

William A. Kinnear – 1919-2009.

If you have been trying to send me stuff at my personal email address, it seems that Namesecure.com has decided to take it’s sweet time setting up my new email services.

Right now, if you try and send mail, the MX record reports that there is an NXDOMAIN.

I am not happy.

Technorati Tags: Namesecure, Namesecure.com, MX, mail

Everyone should have a personal logo.

Here’s mine.

Technorati Tags: personal, logo, personal+logo

I wrote this in December 2004.

A lot of things have changed since then. And a lot has remained immobile.

I don’t know whether to add creative burnout to the raging fire I now know is Bipolar, or to see it as a part of a more general work-related malaise.

I need to talk to a few more people to get a sense of where the work environment is going, what goals I could set for myself. What people expect of me, as compared to what I expect of myself.

We have a strong feeling where the landing points for the family will be within 12-18 months. We have set three possible targets, and each has it’s positives and negatives. We aren’t making a final decision yet, as we want to see how the winds blow.

All we have is 75-80 years. Sometimes it moves too slowly.

Over the next 12-18 months, my plan is to move to working from home more. Like, 100% of the time, when I’m not travelling. To help accomplish this, and to free myself from the servitude to the Telcos, I have started to migrate almost exclusively to Skype for my work communication.

In this area, I bought two SkypeIn numbers over the weekend: One for the US, and one for the UK. So, if you want to contact me (oh yeah, I’m beating down the doors to keep people out — NOT!), I can be reached at:

SKYPE NORMAL: stephen.pierzchala
US: +1.508.471.3865
UK: +44 20 8133 3865

If I am online, I will likely be willing to chat; if not, you’ll bounce to my Skype voicemail.

I love Skype.

Did I mention that I love Skype? Oh, ok…

On November 14, 1986, Charles Mountbatten-Windsor turned 38.

And I turned 18.

I have always been haunted that our two lives are intertwined, twenty years apart.

Happy Birthday Chuck.

The last 4 weeks have been extremely traumatic for me. It has culminated in an extended period of renewal, reflection and rejuvenation, where I have looked back over the last 15 years of my life and asked, “What next?”.

An interesting note on the word rejuvenation: it means to reclaim your childlike state (ok, I’m playing fast and loose with the definition).

Why now? Why 15 years?

In the Fall of 1991, I bought my first computer. Until then, I had avoided using them like the plague. I had managed to get through my undergraduate years with a pen, paper, and an electronic typewriter with rudimentary spell-checking. I felt that I had achieved something; I felt bonded to the works I created.

I was also an avid and active journal-keeper. In the months after my father died, the writing in my journal was what let me empty my naive mind, letting me vent the chaos that rushed through my head on a constant basis.

Then I went to grad school. And I realized then that I would need to step up in order to generate the massive amount of paper that is required in a graduate history program.

It turns out that I found the technology more enticing than the program. To this day, my failure to complete my Masters degree haunts me. Someday, I will return to that, and complete it. Knot the loose ends of my life together.

Ok, this really is going somewhere; thanks for hanging on this far.

After 15 years of intense immersion in technology, the Web, networking, and all that comes along with that, I have realized that something has been missing from my work, my writing, my life. I have missed the rushing sound of pen on a clean sheet of blank paper. No lines to slow you down; nothing besides the edges of the page to define what you put in the book.

Technology has lost its lustre. The rushing stream of this new laptop, that new technology, another over-inflated boom have left me feeling empty, asking “So what?”. In a hundred years, we can be so far down the path to post-humanism that computers as we know them are a vague and distant antique amusement.

Or we could be living in caves, scratching by a subsistence existence.

In either case, the only thing that will remain, that will linger, that will connect us to the past will be the written word. Not the electronic bits and bytes we are now so addicted to, but the ink on paper, graphite on wood pulp.

The smooth, quiet, seductive transition of ideas from mind to physical reality.

I have been trimming back my blog-reading. Gone are the political blogs. I fear that the gadget blogs are next.

What you have left are those people who celebrate life outside the electronic realm. Those who step back, and look back on the knowledge that preceded us. Who pick up a book that was published before they were born.

A book that left the mind of the author and flowed gracefully from the pen, to the paper, to another mind.

15 years is a long time to try and live without paper. Those 15 years have seen the niceties of a bygone age evaporate, get swallowed by an endless sea, a raging torrent of information.

The cursive hand; the thoughtful response; the flowing of ideas from person to person.

To calm the storm of my mind, I have returned to my first love: ideas of the mind, of the soul. Ideas that were worthy of the preparation of the parchment, the sharpening of the quill, the grinding of the pigment to create the ink.

We have walked away from those ideas, grasping at the brass ring in front of us, to the disdain of the treasure chest we leave behind.

To focus on the ideas, that is to live again.

To heal my mind, I must write my mind. Not type it; not IM it or e-mail it or blog it.

That familiar scratch of pen on paper. The rush that comes from committing something to paper; something that you can share with others.

Something that you can set adrift, watch as it floats, the glow from its candle on the gentle rippled flow of all the ideas that have come before.

I am setting my ideas free again.

Picture: girlzone41

Technorati Tags: ideas, quill, ink, pigment, death, life, resurrection, rebirth, technology, paper, pen, rejuvenation, myths, legends, chaos, healing, mind

This post has two underlying reasons for existing: 1) to test out the new MSFT Live Writer Beta; and 2) to talk about a great story that GigaOm pointed us to today.

Om Malik pointed out a story in the Seattle Times today that talked about “Broadband in the Boonies”. Having grown up in the boonies of British Columbia, this immediately got my attention. The story discusses the explosive growth of Internet businesses in the now heavily wired interior of Washington State; the story focuses on the are around Twisp, Winthrop and the Methow Valley.

Until you have been in this area, and I have, you don’t get the possibility of winter isolation. The story talks about how these places are four hours from Seattle; what they neglect to mention is that this is 4 hours in the period between April 15 and October 15, depending on snow.

The direct westerly route to Seattle from these locations passes through the Cascades. Through the extremely high and snowy Cascades.

Samantha and I took a spur of the moment detour through this little part of heaven, pausing a night in a campground in Twisp. Right on the river. When we woke up the next morning, I remembered how much I missed those early morning moments in the mountains.

Twisp is far more isolated than Golden, BC, or any of the other towns that we passed through on our trip this summer. But it is a reminder to us all that place is important. Not because we have to be there, but because it is where we are at home.

I have lived in the Valley. I have lived in Massachusetts. But neither has been home.

And to me, home is worth more than anything.

Technorati Tags: GigaOm, Seattle+Times, Twisp, Winthrop, Methow+Valley, Washington+State, Home, Broadband, Freedom, Om+Malik

The Frog Blog brings us a link to a slideshow highlighting the Spokane River Falls.

Our family visited Spokane often as I was growing up, but I have never seen the falls at full throttle. In fact, it’s damn impressive without water. This amazing outcrop, obviously shaped by water, with only a trickle dribbling over it.

Reminds me of one of those places that we went as a family, when we were still family.

Technorati Tags: Spokane, Spokane River Falls, Spokane River