Image Options for Better Web Performance

Last Updated on Thursday, 18 April 2013 02:34 Written by David Bauernschmidt Tuesday, 23 April 2013 12:00

If you read articles on best practices you will quickly read that one of the best ways to increase performance is to limit your calls to the server as well as “shrink” the size of those files.  Implementing and keeping up with all of the options can actually take a full time job.  However as a small business web developer, I have realized that just implementing some of these can have a profound impact to your site.  We are always loading “assets” from the server to support a page.  These “assets” might include, images, javascript libraries, style sheets, video, audio, etc.  Better managing these assets not only improves performance but in some cases also lowers the band-width requirements.  We are very visual people so it has been my experience that the areas for great performance is to address the images first and then move on to the other areas. I am not saying that the other areas aren’t important but rather some of the little things you can do to images can improve a lot towards performance. My goal is talk about some of the available options as well as give you some thoughts and links that make this even easier.

Why is JQuery AJAX Sending a GET Instead of a POST?

Last Updated on Thursday, 18 April 2013 02:34 Written by David Bauernschmidt Sunday, 21 April 2013 12:00

If I take the same amount of time writing this article as I did finding the problem, then this article would probably be 50,000 words long.  However; I also know that articles are supposed to help individuals quickly solve problems and be enjoyable to read therefore; I had to adjust accordingly.  I found this solution after hours on the internet trying to solve a problem that was created when I upgraded the jquery library from 1.6.1 to 1.8.3.  I cannot prove (yet) that Jquery ultimately caused this problem but I can say that when I use any development tool at my disposal I see something quite interesting.  Let’s play a game of what’s different.  Look at following two sets of code and tell me what is different between them.  There is a lot of other code but this is what is important.

Error When Adding Pinterest Button to Web Site

Last Updated on Thursday, 18 April 2013 02:34 Written by David Bauernschmidt Friday, 19 April 2013 12:00

The other day I had time to go back and look into some errors that I was getting on a web site that I was building. It did not affect the performance or any of the functionality (at least that is what I thought) but it was very annoying to always have to hit the F5 key during debug in VS 2012. I got busy and determined to finish the site, published it and the client really liked it but now was the time for me to go back and look at what was causing this error. The error I am referring to is the error that is an indication that the browser was quicker than the download or the same error when a javascript CDN is offline, but I knew this was not the case.

Working with Selects (dropdowns) in knockout.js

Last Updated on Wednesday, 3 April 2013 06:39 Written by David Bauernschmidt Friday, 5 April 2013 12:00

If you’re like me, I am always excited to try new tools and technologies so in this article I am going to show you how to use knockout.js to bind a dropdown list. It is very similar to non-knockout.js but there is a little bit of a difference. Let’s get started. One quick note is that there are a couple of different ways to do this. If the select name is the same as the value then there is a little easier way to do this, however; in this example I want the name and the value to be different.

Start with creating a jQuery Ajax call. This is pretty much the same as you would for any AJAX method.

Send Email Using jQuery and Web.API (Part 2)

Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 March 2013 09:21 Written by David Bauernschmidt Friday, 22 March 2013 12:00

As promised here is Part 2 of Sending Email using jquery and web.api (including some validation). If you missed Part 1 then get it here. It is important to realize that if you are going to use web.api for web forms then you need to add the following to the global.asax.