I spent several hours today wading through IIS access logs. Not the most fun part to my job, but sometimes necessary. During the course of it though, I found a subtle difference with the way clients (browsers) pass the information that goes into these logs. Hopefully it will be of use to someone else.

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The last few years have seen a huge shift towards building Rich Internet Applications, with technologies such as AJAX and DOM scripting to the fore. Unfortunately, the web is littered with bad examples. This book shows you how to do it properly.

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Following on from yesterday's review of High Performance Web Sites, I had a quick go with YSlow, to see where I could optimise this site.

The starting point was a respectable score of C(71) for the home-page. The first rule that didn't score well was number 2: Use a Content Delivery Network. A CDN is over-kill for a blog, so that left me looking at the following rules 3 (Add Expires Header), 4 (Gzip components) and 13 (Configure Etags).

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When a website is running slow, the traditional response has been to look at optimising the application code. In fact, 90% of the response time is taken downloading and rendering the page and it's constituent elements. In the book High Performance Web Sites, Steve Souders describes 14 rules for improving front-end performance.

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Up until recently, most of my JavaScript work has been fairly minimal. Most javascript form validation is dealt with by cfform, and the main other uses have been for simple things like pop-ups. There's been a few more complex development tasks, but nothing of considerable scale.

Recently though, I've started looking at the new Ajax functionality with coldfusion 8. Although a lot of this is already in place out of the box, I realised that I needed to brush up on things.

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