Web Performance, Branding, and Social Media
In: Blogging| The Web| Web Performance| Work
3 Sep 2008Since I downloaded and started using Chrome yesterday, I have had to rediscover the world of online advertising. Using Firefox and Adblock Plus for nearly three years has shielded from their existence for the most part.
Stephen Noble, in a post on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals, seems to discover that Chrome will be [...]
In: GrabPERF
7 Aug 2007As a part of the reworking of the GrabPERF code, I removed the Google ads from all pages. They were an annoyance, and displayed items were incredibly irrelevant for the site.
I have finally given up on Trillian releasing a new version anytime before the next ice age, and switched to the the messenger client formerly known as GAIM, now known as Pidgin.
Solid, functional, and showing signs that it is in active development. Unlike Trillian, which is slowly becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of messenger clients.
I’m [...]
In: Skype
14 Dec 2006Around the blogs, there are a number of folks talking about Skype making people pay for SkypeOut calls.
Guess what? Everywhere else in the world, you have always had to do this. So I don’t understand what the problem is.
I know that the QoS will improve on SkypeOut once the feeloaders are gone. Free is good, [...]
The last two months have brought substantial changes to my life, and to my view of the world. I am in flux, in change, in limbo. Evelyn Rodriguez of Crossroads Dispatches went through a similar phase lately.
The society we live in is driven by disruption, change, atomization. When you actually translate these messages, they are [...]
Time to put the manic energy I have this morning to use.
One of the most interesting things about Bipolar is that genetics plays a substantial role in determining whether you will have it. In my case, my family is a disaster when it comes to mental health.
On my father’s side, there is a long and [...]
In: Life
11 Oct 2006As a teenager growing up in a very small logging town in the BC interior, I had what could be politely termed unusual musical tastes, especially for the mainstream, heavy-metal, hair-banging kids I hung around with.
But when I was alone with my walkman, I listened to the real geniuses of 80s rock: REM, Kate Bush, [...]
This paper is an extension of the work done for another article that highlighted the performance benefits of retrieving uncompressed and compressed objects directly from the origin server. I wanted to add a proxy server into the stream and determine if proxy servers helped improve the performance of object downloads, and by how much.
Using the [...]
In: Blogging
29 Sep 2006So far, Google Reader is meeting or exceeding all my expectations in all areas except one: auto-refresh. Bloglines occasionally checks back in and loads up new articles, and it would be great if the Google Reader did the same thing.
UPDATE: Looks the interface does this. My mistake!
Stephen Pierzchala is one of a cadre of crazy Canucks living in the United States. A 10-year veteran of the Web performance field, Stephen also writes on topics as diverse as branding and reputation, bipolar, and Web technologies.