Edinburgh Fringe - second day and things get serious

Supermen and women on The Royal Mile

It's when you wake up in the morning in Edinburgh and realise that there are far too many shows to even begin to get your head around, that you realise that just getting up and out there is the best course of action. Experience tells me that 4-5 shows in a day is hard-core but do-able. I am sure there are those who get to do more, but I find that after 4 my brain gets a bit too full.

So second day on the streets of Edinburgh and what did we see?

Well we saw lots and lots of flyer-ing on the Royal Mile - start from there to get a feel for the atmosphere and what you'd like to see.

Selling a show on the Royal Mile

We had already pre-booked theatre in the form of the world premier of An Actor's Lament by and starring Steven Berkoff after lunch, and Adam Hills in the early evening, so had plenty of hours to fill - but what to choose?

So the first thing to get us in the mood was a comedy showcase Just the Tonic off the Royal Mile. We got to see 4 stand-up comedians plus compare for £5 - a pound a pop which was much cheaper than the laughs which were really rather good. Checking out new comics is best done via a showcase - then you can decide to see a fuller set by a particular comic at a later date should you choose. These showcases are often free but if you want quality then it is best to pay something, even if it's just a fiver!

Photo: Berwickshire News

Steven Berkoff's An Actor's Lament was our biggest ticket in terms of price and it was definitely an event that had to be booked way in advance. Joined on stage by actors Jay Benedict and Andree Bernard, this new play gives us an insight into the world of theatre from the point of view of an actor, director and writer.

Never one to miss the opportunity to have a pop at critics (Berkoff is well-known for his intolerance of critics) which he does vociferously in the opening speech, he also puts actors themselves under his own particular spotlight showing up their ego-centricities, vanities and of course their enormous frailty. He takes on the world of theatre but also can't resist pulling apart TV soaps and films that are churned out for the money rather than the artistic value. We see the frustrations of being a performer laid bare for all the world to see, but in my opinion the star of the show is the language itself which is both melodic and has acerbic wit but above all is really quite funny. If you get a chance to see it at a future date then grab it - a real theatrical treat is in store.

The Dance Dome

The wonderful thing about Edinburgh is that you can go and see things you wouldn't normally and it won't be a costly mistake. Our little group all like dance and physical theatre so DanceDome in particular caught our eye. This 'event' took place in a large inflatable dome at the bottom of Cowgate in Dance Base and is a 360 degree film created by an international crew based in Cardiff. Using digital technology, cinema and some great choreography the dancers leapt and wove in film above our heads while the rain absolutely bucketed down outside. There were three films in total featuring everything from contemporary dance to parkour and breakdance - and all with original music. Explore more at The Dance Dome.

The very funny Adam Hills

Adam Hills was our other hot ticket this trip with Adam Hills: Happyism at The Assembly Hall. He opens his show with an audience member joining him on stage for improvised banter which he clearly loves as much as his set. Off-the-cuff and wonderfully spontaneous, Adam Hills is obviously joyful to be alive and although he has a spring in his step his show is one of many layers covering topics from what's not acceptable in society, drawing on his own experiences on US TV, to the differences between Aussie and British culture. It is far more sophisticated than you first imagine seamlessly switching from one topic to another, but he does make an audience laugh - really laugh. He will soon be up with the greats in terms of stand-up and I'm not surprised he has packed out such a large venue for two weeks here in Edinburgh. He overran by 15 minutes - apparently this happens a lot - which isn't great if you've got another show to catch, but it was obvious that he could have gone on all night if time had allowed, we were all having so much fun.

   

Ballet Revolucion!

It's a real shame but tonight is the last performance at the Peacock Theatre of Ballet Revolucion, but it's well worth a mention as they will be back and if you get a chance to see them where you live then grasp it firmly with both hands!

I went along on Tuesday and I can honestly say it is one of the most athletic dance experiences I have ever seen. These Cuban's sure know how to dance, both classical ballet and contemporary with a bit of street thrown in for good measure. It should be really cheesy dancing to music by everyone from Prince to Shakira but the band are so tight and the dancers so utterly superb that you are quite mesmerized for the full two hours.

It's also great to see a dance troupe where the sexes get equal billing. The girls take as much of the centre stage as the boys and are just as important to the whole rhythm and colour of the spectacle.

Purists have said they only come into their own when dancing to Latin beats and it's fair to say that this really is their strength, but the less up tempo and more classic numbers do hold their own and showcase variety which is always a good thing in my book.

Experience a bit here for yourself and as I say grab a ticket if you see them return to the UK. Viva La Revolucion!

Make the web faster with mod_pagespeed, now out of Beta

If your page is on the web, speed matters. For developers and webmasters, making your page faster shouldn’t be a hassle, which is why we introduced mod_pagespeed in 2010. Since then the development team has been working to improve the functionality, quality and performance of this open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and their resources. Now, after almost two years and eighteen releases, we are announcing that we are taking off the Beta label.

We’re committed to working with the open-source community to continue evolving mod_pagespeed, including more, better and smarter optimizations and support for other web servers. Over 120,000 sites are already using mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages using the latest techniques and trends in optimization. The product is used worldwide by individual sites, and is also offered by hosting providers, such as DreamHost, Go Daddy and content delivery networks like EdgeCast. With the move out of beta we hope that even more sites will soon benefit from the web performance improvements offered through mod_pagespeed.

mod_pagespeed is a key part of our goal to help make the web faster for everyone. Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, conversions, and retention. In fact, page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores. Besides evangelizing for speed, we offer tools and technologies to help measure, quantify, and improve performance, such as Site Speed Reports in Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and PageSpeed Optimization products. In fact, both mod_pagespeed and PageSpeed Service are based on our open-source PageSpeed Optimization Libraries project, and are important ways in which we help websites take advantage of the latest performance best practices.

To learn more about mod_pagespeed and how to incorporate it in your site, watch our recent Google Developers Live session or visit the mod_pagespeed product page.


Posted by Joshua Marantz and Ilya Grigorik, Google PageSpeed Team

Making more pages load instantly

Webmaster level: All


At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've long known that even seemingly minor speed increases can have surprisingly large impacts on user engagement and happiness. About a year ago we rolled out Instant Pages in pursuit of that goal. Instant Pages makes use of prerendering technology in Chrome to make your site appear to load instantly in some cases, with no need for any extra work on your part. Here's a video of it in action:

We've been closely watching performance and listening to webmaster feedback. Since Instant Pages rolled out we've saved more than a thousand years of ours users' time. We're very happy with the results so far, and we'll be gradually increasing how often we trigger the feature.

In the vast majority of cases, webmasters don't have to do anything for their sites to work correctly with prerendering. As we mentioned in our initial announcement of Instant Pages, search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature: only results the user visits will be counted. If your site keeps track of pageviews on its own, you might be interested in the Page Visibility API, which allows you to detect when prerendering is occurring and factor those out of your statistics. If you use an ads or analytics package, check with them to see if their solution is already prerender-aware; if it is, in many cases you won't need to make any changes at all. If you're interested in triggering Chrome's prerendering within your own site, see the Prerendering in Chrome article.

Instant Pages means that users arrive at your site happier and more engaged, which is great for everyone.


Posted by Ziga Mahkovec - Software Engineer, Instant Pages

Preparing your site for a traffic spike

Webmaster level: Intermediate

It’s a moment any site owner both looks forward to, and dreads: a huge surge in traffic to your site (yay!) can often cause your site to crash (boo!). Maybe you’ll create a piece of viral content, or get Slashdotted, or maybe Larry Page will get a tattoo and your site on tech tattoos will be suddenly in vogue.

Many people go online immediately after a noteworthy event—a political debate, the death of a celebrity, or a natural disaster—to get news and information about that event. This can cause a rapid increase in traffic to websites that provide relevant information, and may even cause sites to crash at the moment they’re becoming most popular. While it’s not always possible to anticipate such events, you can prepare your site in a variety of ways so that you’ll be ready to handle a sudden surge in traffic if one should occur:

• Prepare a lightweight version of your site.
  Consider maintaining a lightweight version of your website; you can then switch all of your traffic over to this lightweight version if you start to experience a spike in traffic. One good way to do this is to have a mobile version of your site, and to make the mobile site available to desktop/PC users during periods of high traffic. Another low-effort option is to just maintain a lightweight version of your homepage, since the homepage is often the most-requested page of a site as visitors start there and then navigate out to the specific area of the site that they’re interested in. If a particular article or picture on your site has gone viral, you could similarly create a lightweight version of just that page.
  A couple tips for creating lightweight pages:
• Exclude decorative elements like images or Flash wherever possible; use text instead of images in the site navigation and chrome, and put most of the content in HTML.
• Use static HTML pages rather than dynamic ones; the latter place more load on your servers. You can also cache the static output of dynamic pages to reduce server load.
• Take advantage of stable third-party services.
  Another alternative is to host a copy of your site on a third-party service that you know will be able to withstand a heavy stream of traffic. For example, you could create a copy of your site—or a pared-down version with a focus on information relevant to the spike—on a platform like Google Sites or Blogger; use services like Google Docs to host documents or forms; or use a content delivery network (CDN).
• Use lightweight file formats.
  If you offer downloadable information, try to make the downloaded files as small as possible by using lightweight file formats. For example, offering the same data as a plain text file rather than a PDF can allow users to download the exact same content at a fraction of the filesize (thereby lightening the load on your servers). Also keep in mind that, if it’s not possible to use plain text files, PDFs generated from textual content are more lightweight than PDFs with images in them. Text-based PDFs are also easier for Google to understand and index fully.
• Make tabular data available in CSV and XML formats.
  If you offer numerical or tabular data (data displayed in tables), we recommend also providing it in CSV and/or XML format. These filetypes are relatively lightweight and make it easy for external developers to use your data in external applications or services in cases where you want the data to reach as many people as possible, such as in the wake of a natural disaster.

We’d love to hear your tips and tricks for weathering traffic spikes—come join us in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Page Speed Service - Web Performance, Delivered.

Webmaster level: Advanced

Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their web pages faster. Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, today we are releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.

At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You can request access to the service by filling out this web form.

Posted by Ram Ramani, Engineering Manager

Page Speed Online has a shiny new API

Andrew

Richard

Webmaster level: intermediate

A few weeks ago, we introduced Page Speed Online, a web-based performance analysis tool that gives developers optimization suggestions. Almost immediately, developers asked us to make an API available to integrate into other tools and their regression testing suites. We were happy to oblige.

Today, as part of Google I/O, we are excited to introduce the Page Speed Online API as part of the Google APIs. With this API, developers now have the ability to integrate performance analysis very simply in their command-line tools and web performance dashboards.

We have provided a getting started guide that helps you to get up and running quickly, understand the API, and start monitoring the performance improvements that you make to your web pages. Not only that, in the request, you’ll be able to specify whether you’d like to see mobile or desktop analysis, and also get Page Speed suggestions in one of the 40 languages that we support, giving API access to the vast majority of developers in their native or preferred language.

We’re also pleased to share that the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache now uses the Page Speed Online API to provide Page Speed suggestions to WordPress users, right in the WordPress dashboard. “The Page Speed tool itself provides extremely pointed and valuable insight into performance pitfalls. Providing that tool via an API has allowed me to directly correlate that feedback with actionable solutions that W3 Total Cache provides.” said Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable and W3 Total Cache author.

Take the Page Speed Online API for a spin and send us feedback on our mailing list. We’d love to hear your experience integrating the new Page Speed Online API.

Andrew Oates is a Software Engineer on the Page Speed Team in Google's Cambridge, Massachusetts office. You can find him in the credits for the Pixar film Up.

Richard Rabbat is the Product Management Lead on the "Make the Web Faster" initiative. He has launched Page Speed, mod_pagespeed and WebP. At Google since 2006, Richard works with engineering teams across the world.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Andrew Oates and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed Team

Introducing Page Speed Online, with mobile support

Webmaster level: intermediate

At Google, we’re striving to make the whole web fast. As part of that effort, we’re launching a new web-based tool in Google Labs, Page Speed Online, which analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.

In addition, we’ve added a new feature: the ability to get Page Speed suggestions customized for the mobile version of a page, specifically smartphones. Due to the relatively limited CPU capabilities of mobile devices, the high round-trip times of mobile networks, and rapid growth of mobile usage, understanding and optimizing for mobile performance is even more critical than for the desktop, so Page Speed Online now allows you to easily analyze and optimize your site for mobile performance. The mobile recommendations are tuned for the unique characteristics of mobile devices, and contain several best practices that go beyond the recommendations for desktop browsers, in order to create a faster mobile experience. New mobile-targeted best practices include eliminating uncacheable landing page redirects and reducing the amount of JavaScript parsed during the page load, two common issues that slow down mobile pages today.

Page Speed Online is powered by the same Page Speed SDK that powers the Chrome and Firefox extensions and webpagetest.org.

Please give Page Speed Online a try. We’re eager to hear your feedback on our mailing list and how you’re using it to optimize your site.

Posted by Andrew Oates and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed team

You and site performance, sitting in a tree...

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

...k, i, s, s, i, n, g! Perhaps you heard our announcement that speed is a signal in rankings, but didn’t know where to start. We’d like to help foster a lasting relationship between you and a responsive experience for your users. Last week I filmed my updated presentation from "The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters" which includes three first steps to understanding site performance. So grab headphones and some popcorn, then verify ownership of your website and download a plugin, and we’ll all be comfy with site performance in no time.

Just curious about the Q&A? No problem! Here you go:

Is it possible to check my server response time from different areas around the world?

Yes. WebPagetest.org can test performance from the United States (both East and West Coast—go West Coast! :), United Kingdom, China, and New Zealand.

What's a good response time to aim for?

First, if your competition is fast, they may provide a better user experience than your site for your same audience. In that case, you may want to make your site better, stronger, faster...

Otherwise, studies by Akamai claim 2 seconds as the threshold for ecommerce site "acceptability." Just as an FYI, at Google we aim for under a half-second.

Does progressive rendering help users?

Definitely! Progressive rendering is when a browser can display content as it’s available incrementally rather than waiting for all the content to display at once. This provides users faster visual feedback and helps them feel more in control. Bing experimented with progressive rendering by sending users their visual header (like the logo and searchbox) quickly, then the results/ads once they were available. Bing found a 0.7% increase in satisfaction with progressive rendering. They commented that this improvement compared with full feature rollout.

How can you implement progressive rendering techniques on your site? Put stylesheets at the top of the page. This allows a browser to start displaying content ASAP.

Page speed plugin, videos, articles, and help forum are all found at code.google.com/speed/.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Using site speed in web search ranking

Webmaster Level: All

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.

• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's experience on the Internet.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team