JSter is a catalog of over 1,100 JavaScript libraries and tools for web development, where users can rate contributions, and share their experience with others. jsDelivr is a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) where any web developer can host their files, including CSS, fonts, JavaScript, jQuery plugins, etc. Currently almost 600 projects are hosted on jsDelivr.

To find out more about these two projects, we interviewed Dmitriy Akulov (representing jsDelivr) and Juho Vepsäläinen (representing JSter).

Q: Let’s start with jsDelivr, Dmitriy. According to the site, jsDelivr is “a free super-fast CDN for developers and webmasters.” Explain a bit more what that means.

A: jsDelivr is a public open-source CDN where anyone can submit a project to be hosted and delivered by our network. Most people probably know that Google hosts jQuery and a few other popular libraries. We don’t look at the popularity of the project to approve it for inclusion in jsDelivr. Plus a lot more types of projects are allowed, like CSS frameworks, fonts, WordPress plugins etc. By using GitHub, we allow the community to fully interact with jsDelivr by adding and updating files.

What makes it super-fast is the unique multi-CDN infrastructure we use. MaxCDN (NetDNA) and CDN.net (which is powered by the huge federated network of OnApp) agreed to combine their powers for the good of the open source community and to sponsor us and become our CDN providers.

All traffic to our CDN providers is load balanced based on availability and performance for each individual user by another official sponsor of ours, the company Cedexis. This unique system not only gives us the best possible uptime and performance but also allows us to expand dynamically and add new providers on the fly.

Q: There are many CDNs available to developers, webmasters, and others today. Why should they use jsDelivr?

A: Currently we host 570 projects, which makes us the biggest public CDN out there.

Plus jsDelivr is free, fast and open source. We have no strict rules, and we don’t take weeks to respond to requests and update projects. Everything happens within a couple of days, and any GitHub pulls are merged even faster.

Since the project is non-profit everything is done with the users in mind. We do not rely on a single CDN provider, which makes jsDelivr independent, and no single company can influence us with their decisions. As we mentioned, our setup is very flexible, and we have good relationships with plenty of CDN providers. So even if it would happen that we experience issues with one provider we can switch without any problems.

Q: Then let’s move on to JSter, Juho. What is it about? What motivated its development?

A: You could say the whole thing got started in January 2011. A friend of mine asked for a list of JavaScript game engines. As I could not find one I created one, and for one reason or another I shared it at the JavaScript section of Reddit. Encouraged by the feedback I decided to start cataloguing JavaScript libraries and tools. This led to the birth of jswiki.

In all its simplicity, it has proven to be a valuable community resource. Early 2012 I was approached by the developer of Socket.io, Guillermo Rauch. He proposed that it would be a nice idea to take the content and wrap it into an alternative user interface. Some further development and ghw was born. It is a tool that allows me to achieve just this, and you can see the results at jswiki.org.

Even though this was a step forward, there was still some functionality missing. Some of it simply cannot be implemented without having some kind of a backend. The developer of Symfohub, Michael Bodnarchuk, contacted me some time after this. Given that he had some technology already and I had content and some vision on where to take it we decided to collaborate.

As a result, JSter.net was born. The jswiki data provided us a starting point, and it has grown immensely since. Besides having just a catalog, we have also produced original content for our blog. And we are continuously improving the service. Our primary goal is to make it easier for people to find new libraries and make their own libraries more visible. It is so very easy to miss some awesome library you just might need.

Q: If someone would want to help out with either project, how could they do that?

A: For JSter we are continuously looking for ways to improve our site and want to make it more useful for you, the developers. You can highlight immediate issues via that little “Problems?” button in the corner of the site. Alternatively you can poke us directly through email for more complex queries.

Of course, given that we are basically a library catalog we may be missing some great projects so we definitely don’t mind if you help us find those. So go ahead and add anything you might feel we’re missing.

In terms of jsDelivr, the best help for us is the support of the community. Add a new project, update an old one, submit some feature requests, etc. This helps a lot. And of course use our CDN and integrate it in your services. The increasing number of hits, to see how people use it, that’s what keeps us going.

Q: Finally, can you tell us something about the future for either site?

A: For JSter, we have some interesting things in store. This includes programmatic access to the data, code metrics, and, of course, more blog posts. Basically we want to improve our offering and make it more appealing to the community.

When it comes to jsDelivr, we plan an even bigger and faster network by combining region-specific providers. In addition, we always try to develop new features that will help and benefit our users.

If anyone reading this has some ideas, just send them to us, we’re always willing to listen to ideas.

Have you created a cool web dev project?

We’d like to say a bit thank you to Dmitriy and Juho. Neither project may be that big yet but the passion that drives these guys to keep developing and improving the projects is impressive. We can only think that there are big things in store for JSter and jsDelivr in the future.

Have you created something cool, some project for the community, which you’d like to share with us? We’d love to hear all about it so please let us know in the comments below or reach out to us on Twitter.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

This week we have selected articles on autmating web performance optimization, fallback for when CDNs fail, programming language popularity, and more.

This week’s suggested reading

• Automating Performance Best Practices with PageSpeed: Video of Ilya Grigorik’s presentation at Google I/O.
• Automating Web Performance Optimization: A presentation by Tobias Baldauf, in which he says that web performance optimization itself can become very time consuming. The presentation covers how to automate monitoring and optimization to keep your sites fast and resilient.
• CDNs fail, but your scripts don’t have to – fallback from CDN to local jQuery: If you put content on CDNs, you increase your external dependabilities. Scott Hanselman shows how you can use jQuery to create a fallback, just in case the CDN you use fails.
• User Experience Trends for Admin Dashboards: Jake Rocheleau takes a look into various styles and ideas for creating administration dashboard pages.
• Programming Language Popularity: Drew Conway has created an interactive chart of how popular different programming languages are based on data from Github and StackOverflow.

You can also subscribe to these articles

You can also subscribe to these weekly articles and receive them in your email inbox as soon as a new one has been published. Sign up here!

Image via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

But what percentage of sites with a given country code top-level (ccTLD) domain, such as .se for Sweden or .jp for Japan, are hosted in that particular country? As it turns out, people in Germany, South Korea, and Vietnam are the most likely to choose onshore web hosting (hosting your website in the country where you live.)

Onshore web hosting

Following our previous study about where the top 1 million sites in the world were hosted, we were contacted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. It had the idea to see how many sites with a particular ccTLD are actually hosted in the country with that ccTLD. In other words, for websites with ccTLDs, how common is onshore web hosting? Hence this study was born.

Why look at only ccTLDs? Because by selecting a ccTLD for their website, arguably a website owner identifies themselves and their site with that country.

You can read more about our methodology at the end of the article, and you can see the compiled data here. But let’s start off with a summary in the form of a world map (the redder a country is, the higher percentage of ccTLD sites are hosted onshore.)

Highest percentage of sites hosted in country

The number of sites hosted in each country as shown above is interesting but let’s take that one step further. Here is a list of the top 10 countries with the highest percentage of ccTLD sites hosted in their respective country.

This means, for example, in the case of South Korea that 97% of websites (in the top million) with a .kr ccTLD are hosted in South Korea, 93% of the sites with a .vn ccTLD are hosted in Vietnam, etc.

Some things worth highlighting:

• It is notable that Germany and Japan are also on the list of the ccTLDs that have the most sites in the top 1 million (see below.) It would seem that website owners in those two countries really prefer to host websites at home.
• Comoros (km), North Korea (kp), and Swaziland (sz) actually have 100% of their sites hosted in their respective country, but we’re only talking about 1, 3, and 2 sites respectively.
• 65 countries have none of their sites hosted in their respective country, biggest one is Tuvalu (tv) with 3,387 sites, followed by Montenegro (me) 2,260 sites, and Cocos Islands (cc) 1,607 sites.

Most number of sites in total

To round off this study, we’re simply listing the ccTLDs that have the most sites in the top 1 million.

To put this in perspective, out of the 1 million sites we looked at in total, just over 509,000 were on the .com TLD.

Is onshore web hosting even an issue?

Arguably the widest selection of different web hosting options is available in the U.S. and the country’s domination in the industry is crushing. But if you don’t live in the U.S. you may want to host your site in the country where you live for a variety of reasons: access, language, legal issues, payment options, latency and performance, etc.

We find it very interesting to see how this varies so much between countries. From the 97% of .kr sites being hosted in South Korea to the 71% of .se sites being hosted in Sweden and beyond. Clearly, on the other end of the scale, that so many sites with ccTLDs are hardly or not at all hosted in their respective country, also tells us something about the global web hosting market.

What about you? Do you host your site in the country where you live, and are you doing that for any particular reason? Let us know in the comments below.

About the methodology: To be able to answer the question posed by this study, we scanned all the sites in the Alexa top 1 million list for where they are physically hosted. All in all, we managed to scan 947,461 sites. From that list, we removed all gTLDs (Generic Top-Level Domains), including. com. We also removed sites for which there was no identifiable country or TLD. That left us with sites using a ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level Domain). This means, of course, that in practice the United States is not included in this study (except the few sites using the .us domain). The primary reason for this is that we were interested in the relationship between country-specific websites and where they are hosted. Including the .com domain would have meant more sites were included in the study but it would arguably also have made the results less reliable. All in all, included in this study are 309,129 sites split up over 230 countries.

Image (Top) via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Today we’re releasing a simple tool with which you can display the real user performance of any website, not just the ones you monitor. Think of it as a sample of what the full Real User Monitoring service can do.

The Real User Monitoring bookmarklet is free and easy to install. Here’s what it does and how to get started.

What the bookmarklet does

To put it briefly, the bookmarklet enables you to view the performance of any website you browse to. It is based on the same Real User Monitoring technology that our customers are already using to monitor the performance of thousands of websites.

Before we get to how to install the bookmarklet, let’s spend some time on RUM. Real User Monitoring gives you a detailed view of the performance of your site and how real users experience it, at the moment they browse into it. When you have RUM enabled for your site, we collect data from all visitors to the site in real-time.  This can involve what kind of connections, browsers, and devices your visitors are using, their geographic location, and more. And you see aggregated data over different time periods based on each and every user that visits your site, not a limited sample of the data.

Keep in mind that although the bookmarklet displays much the same information as you would see if you have RUM enabled on your site, there are some important differences:

• The bookmarklet only provides a snapshot of a site’s performance at the moment you visit it.
• With RUM enabled you can see real user data based on all visits over different periods of time, including how it changes in real-time.
• In the RUM section of your account in my.pingdom.com you can see the visitor data aggregated and summarized in easy-to-use charts and graphs.
• This means, for example, that you can see how visitors from a particular country or those who use a particular browser experience your site.

How to add the bookmarklet

To start using the bookmarklet is really easy. Just drag the button below (it says “Real User Monitoring”) to the bookmarks toolbar in your browser and you’re all set to go.

Once the link is added to your bookmarks toolbar, go to the site you want to see the performance of and click the link in the toolbar.

You will then be presented with a display showing you the performance of that site. For example:

From there you can share the performance of the site you visited using Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

Try Real User Monitoring bookmarklet today

We hope you will try the RUM bookmarklet and use it to have a look at the performance of different websites you visit. If you would want to keep an eye on your site’s performance, sign up for an account to start monitoring it today.

We have collected a wide range of resources for you if you want to learn more about Real User Monitoring and how it can help you improve the performance of your site.

Note about compatibility: The Real User Monitoring bookmarklet works in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 9 and 10. It does not currently work in Opera or Safari.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Something unique to the Team plan is tagging of checks. By adding tags to your checks, you can organize and sort your checks in new ways. You can also get additional information about the site or server that the check monitors. Let’s have a look at how tags can help you manage your Pingdom account.

Auto-tags and user tags

We currently support two types of tags on the Team plan: user tags and auto-tags.

• User tags are tags you create and control. Typically, when you create a check, you will type in a number of tags that describe that check. This could be, for example, “Marketing department,” or “datacenter2.” You can at any time edit these tags, add new ones, and remove them.
• Auto-tags are automatically added to a check when you create it. The purpose of auto-tags is to keep a running profile of the site or server the check monitors. Typically, auto-tags will include what web server software the site runs, what ports are open, what protocols are supported, where it is located, etc. Auto-tags are updated every 24 hours or when you make changes to the check. You cannot make changes to auto-tags but in any other way they work in the same way as user tags.

We are especially excited about the auto-tags because the engine we developed for auto-tagging will be used for other things in the future. For that, all we can say at this point is “stay tuned.”

Adding user tags

You can either add user tags when you create a new check or add them to existing checks.

When you create a new check (in your my.pingdom.com Dashboard, click on Add New Check), you will see a box labeled Check tags.

You fill in the name of the check, how often you want the test to be executed (Check interval), what type of check you want to create, and the URL of the site you want to monitor.

As soon as you have typed in the URL, we will connect to the site and try to identify as much information about the server as possible. What we find will be automatically entered into the Check tags box, and they are colored gray. These tags are what we call auto-tags.

In the bottom half of the Check tags box, you can type in any other tags you would want to assign to the check. These tags are called user tags and they are as mentioned earlier, editable later. User tags show up in blue. To add user tags, you simply type a tag, hit enter or space, and then continue typing the name of the next tag.

Sort by tags

One important functionality that tags support is sorting checks, which works the same way whether it’s user tags or auto-tags.

When you are looking at your list of checks, simply type in the name of a tag in the search box and you will automatically be shown just checks that are tagged accordingly.

You can also click on the tag-icon, then click on the tag you want to focus on and only checks with that tag will be displayed. Also note that the tag-icon shows how many tags are associated with that particular check (auto-tags and user tags combined), and next to each tag it shows how many checks that tag is associated with.

Edit and remove user tags

You can of course edit user tags as you like. The most straightforward way is to edit the check, and in the Check tags box you can just point to a tag and click the “x” to remove it.

You can also click Edit tags on the left hand side of the Checks page. That will show you a screen with all your tags. From here, you can edit or remove user tags.

If you click the edit icon for a tag, you can edit the tag and choose on which check(s) it is applied as shown below.

Remember to click Modify tag when you’re done to save the changes.

Mo’ tagging

That’s pretty much it for tagging, at least for now. We hope that you will find tagging checks as useful as we do, especially when managing accounts with hundreds if not thousands of checks. The auto-tags serve as a great foundation for organizing your checks and with user checks in place you should find it a lot easier to manage the monitoring of your sites. Add to that the user tags you can add yourself and you will find that tags make it much easier to manage your Pingdom account.

If you’d like to take the tagging functionality for a spin, simply sign up for a Team account and you’ll be able to try tagging and more.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

This week’s suggested reading

• How fast are we going now?: Steve Souders wonders if the web is getting faster. He concludes that overall, web pages are faster now than they were a year ago.
• Case study: How effective are CDNs for mobile visitors?: Radware took a look at how CDNs affect the web experience over 3G connections. With a CDN, pages got faster, doc complete time decreased by 10%, and start render time was just under a second faster.
• Obsessions: HTTP Request Reduction: Kyle Simpson suggests that just concatenating all your files into one is only a partial solution to speed up a site.
• Avoiding Unnecessary Paints: Paul Lewis takes a look at what can trigger painting in a browser, and how we can prevent unnecessary paints from taking place.
• This is what a DDoS attack looks like: On April 23, 2013, VideoLAN experienced a DDoS attack, which peaked at 200 Gbps.
• It is okay to be wrong: A good reminder from James Turnbull, VP Tech Operations for Puppet Labs.
• 20 CDN & Web Performance Stats Worth Noting: Lots of interesting data and facts about CDN and web performance.
• Scaling Deployment at Etsy: Daniel Schauenberg’s talk at Scaleconf 2013 about how Etsy keeps deployment fast.

You can also subscribe to these articles

You can also subscribe to these weekly articles and receive them in your email inbox as soon as a new one has been published. Sign up here!

Images via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

With over 65 million WordPress sites in the world, it’s clear that Automattic’s platform is popular. But let’s have a look at the entire top 100.

WordPress keeps on gaining in popularity

We grabbed the list of the top 100 blogs in the world from Technorati and tried to identify which blogging platform or CMS the site is using. Out of the 100 blogs, we could identify and verify the platform in use by 94 of the sites. For the other 6, we could not ourselves confirm the platform, nor did we get any replies from the sites when reaching out to them. You can read more about our methodology at the end of the article.

Here is the result of our 2013 study of the blogging platforms used by the top 100 blogs:

You can also download a larger version of this chart.

Comparing 2013 and 2012

Here are a few comments about what’s happened since our last study in 2012:

• In total, WordPress has increased from 48 to 52 out of the top 100 blogs.

• TypePad has increased somewhat, from 2 to 4 sites.

• Movable Type has decreased from 7 to 4 sites.

• Drupal dropped 1 site.

• Tumblr stays on the list with 1 site after making its entrance on the top 100 last year.

• CrowdFusion stays on the list with 1 site. It has since last year changed name to Ceros.

• Scoop was on the list last year, used by DailyKos.com. It may be that DailyKos is still using Scoop, but we could not verify this, therefore the site is now included in the N/A category.

• Among the switches during the year we noted that Mashable has moved from WordPress to Custom, and Twitter switched to Drupal from Blogger.

• Neatorama appears to be running a combination of Varo and WordPress, so we put it in the Custom category.

• Google’s Blogger gained a site and is now up to 3.

• The 6 sites marked as “N/A” we didn’t manage to get any information about. Even after repeatedly reaching out to the site owners and admins, we were unable to get any replies.

• It’s very likely that a big chunk of the “N/A” sites are, in fact, Custom, and if we add the two categories together, that’s 19% of the top 100 list.

• Last year we differentiated between hosted and self-hosted WordPress. This year, to simplify matters, we put all WordPress in one category.

And here are the aggregated results, including a comparison to 2012:

Complete list: top 100 blogs and their blog platforms

Here is the complete list of the top 100 blogs, presented in order of Technorati rank:

Blogging’s future

We’d like to send a big thank you to everyone that helped us out with this article. You are too many to mention, but we truly appreciate your help.

There’s no denying that blogging has changed in the last few years, especially with the arrival of social media like Facebook and Twitter. For many of us, what we used to blog about we now publish to social networks.

But there’s also no denying that blogging is not gone. It has, however, changed as has the tools used to publish blogs with. Some, like WordPress, started out as blogging platforms and has taken on more general content management functionality. Others have developed in the opposite direction. Even though we believe it will be increasingly hard to distinguish what is a blogging platform we are certainly interested in following the developments. Therefore, we already look forward to doing the same study next year again.

Which platform do you use and why? Let us know in the comments below.

Methodology: Since the Technorati Top 100 is updated every day, we froze our list on March 20, 2013, and then set out to investigate what blogging platform or CMS each site is using. For each site, we started by using third-party services like BuiltWith and Wappalyzer, to see if they would reveal anything about the site. If that did not give us any results, we proceeded with tools like host, whois, and dig. Only if that still didn’t tell us what we needed, did we get in touch with the site through contact details published. Out of the 100 sites we were unable to get confirmation for 6 sites.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

One of the most sought after features we added to the Team plan is multi-user log in. Now you can have multiple users per account and control what each user should be able to do, including access to subscription and billing information, the ability to edit checks, etc. Let’s take a closer look at what you can do with multi-user log in.

Invite user

To get started with multi-user log in you have to invite other people to your Pingdom account. You do this very simply by going to Account > Users when you’re logged in to my.pingdom.com.

There you click on the Invite User button.

Next, on the Invite new user screen, enter the email address of the person you want to invite. Then, select what kind of user type they should be.

When you click the Send Invite button, an email is sent to the user you’re inviting. In the email, they have to click a link and follow some simple instructions to get started.

Three user types

Each user you invite to your Pingdom account can be of one type: admin, user, or restricted user. Here are some of the main differences between the user types:

• Admin

  • Same as the owner of the account, the admin user can make any changes to the account, checks, etc. This includes changing subscription and billing information and inviting new users. However, only the account owner can close an account.

• User

  • Someone with the user type account can add and edit checks, as well as view reports. They can not, however, access subscription and billing information.

• Restricted user

  • A restricted user can view checks but not make any changes to them. They can also view reports.

The various user types will see some differences in their my.pingdom.com account. For example, here is the Account menu as admin:

For users and restricted users, the menu is not displayed:

Here is the drop-down menu available on the Checks page for a user (left) and a restricted user (right):

Switch accounts

You can of course very easily switch between the accounts you have access to. Just click on your username in the bar just below the row of icons in the main menu and you can choose which account you want to use.

Notice that the bar will be gray whenever you are in the account shared with you, and yellow when you are in your account.

Receive notifications

If you’ve been given access to another Pingdom account, you can of course also receive notifications for when checks in the main account fail. You do this simply by adding yourself as a contact.

Go to Contacts > Add New Contact, and enter your details. After you’ve saved the new contact’s details, you can add yourself to receive notifications for the check.

Feedback and support

Hopefully you are already using the multi-user log in feature. If you are, why don’t you share your experience with the rest of us in the comments below?

We hope you will also check out other features, such as Real User Monitoring and Transaction Monitoring, and we’re confident that you will find they will become invaluable tools in your web monitoring and performance toolbox.

We will be back soon again with more articles about the Team plan. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see added to the Team plan, you can tell us about it here.

Image (top) via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Based on data collected from real users visiting your site, you will see where visitors are connecting from, what browsers and devices they are using, how fast individual pages load, and more. With that information you can then take steps to improve your site’s performance.

We interviewed James Oakley, the developer of a new Drupal module that makes it easy to integrate our RUM service with Drupal. Especially if you are running a Drupal site, you will want to read this.

Q: What made you develop this module?

A: I wanted to try out the new RUM service, so I signed up, and was given a piece of JavaScript to insert into the HEAD section of the pages of my website. My site was built in Drupal; it’s easy to add snippets of HTML into any region of the page in Drupal (they have a system called “blocks” that allows you to do just that). However inserting into the HEAD section is a little more challenging.

I wrote a module to do just that, and it worked. However one of the things that makes Drupal great is its community, so I wanted to contribute my module back for others to use. After tidying the code up so that it is secure and coded the Drupal way, it’s now available for any Drupal site administrator to download and use with just a few clicks.

Q: Why Drupal in particular? What’s so special about Drupal?

James Oakley

A: I wouldn’t want to be dismissive of the other content management systems out there, because they have their places. Drupal is so versatile, that it can build almost any kind of site. When I first started working on a dynamic website and was looking for a CMS (about 6 years ago now), I chose Drupal. I didn’t know what that site would need to do down the line, but I did know that there would be a way to do it with Drupal. I’ve found that to be true – it’s easy to add customized content, and to lay the page out in the way you want. There is a great community out there as well, and people like to help each other out.

Sometimes people say that Drupal is only for people who can already write PHP. I don’t know where that myth comes from. Certainly a bit of PHP would help with debugging if you hit a problem, and you can extend Drupal by writing your own modules. But Drupal has so many well-written modules and themes; you can just download and enable them, and then configure them entirely within the web interface of your Drupal site.

Q: Why would the Real User Monitoring service be especially beneficial for Drupal sites?

A: Some people don’t use Drupal because they say it’s slow or needs a very highly specified server. Neither of those things needs to be true. Whilst Drupal is not right for every site, there are quite a few things that can be tweaked and tuned to make Drupal run much faster.

To do that, I need to know how actual users are experiencing my site. I need to see if it’s the main HTML that’s loading slowly, or the additional resources. Because certain modules can slow a site down if not configured correctly, I need to know if particular pages load more slowly than others, as then I can identify which modules may be causing the slowness.

Q: How about Drupal and performance? Are there any typical bottlenecks to tackle?

A: Two big bottlenecks that everyone should optimize are caching and aggregation. Since Drupal 7, both of these have been manageable without installing any additional modules.

Caching is about making sure that the web server doesn’t have to generate every page from scratch every time someone visits it. You can set Drupal to cache whole pages, or just to cache certain stages of building a page. You also have full control over how long that cached data remains valid. Setting up caching correctly would reduce server load and speed up page generation considerably. The views module now comes with caching options as well, which must be used on a production site.

Aggregation is about making sure that all the additional files a web page needs are presented efficiently. Out of the box, Drupal will list each JS or CSS file separately, meaning the web browser has to make a lot of requests for each web page. You can enable aggregation, which then combines that JS and CSS code into just a few files, which speeds up the page layout in the browser.

Q: You have used our RUM service for a short while now. In your experience, what does adding RUM to a website offer the website owner/admin?

A: You cannot beat being able to see how actual users are experiencing your site.

There are statistics and analytics services out there that will track how many visitors come to your site, from which countries, and visiting which pages. I use those. There are also synthetic website monitoring services out there, like the traditional Pingdom offering, that load a test page on a site every minute to see if it’s slowing down or unavailable. I use those too.

Analytics services can only tell you that someone has been to your site, not what kind of experience they had. Synthetic monitoring can only tell you how your test page is performing, but that may not mean that the whole site is responding as well. Pingdom RUM brings those two together. I get detailed analytic feedback on actual visits to my sites. That means I can keep the site tuned so that it is performing optimally.

There’s also a WordPress plugin

We’d like to say thank you to James for taking the time to do this interview and for his work on the Drupal module. It’s great to be able to tap into an experienced Drupal-user like James to get his views on Drupal, RUM, and web performance.

If you’re a WordPress user you’re not left out. You may want to check out our WordPress plugin for Real User Monitoring.

If you don’t yet have a RUM site set up, you simply add one by logging in to your account at my.pingdom.com and go to RUM > Add New Site. And if you don’t have a Pingdom account, get one here.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

This week’s suggested reading

• Performance benchmark of popular PHP frameworks: Lukasz Kujawa puts 13 PHP frameworks through their paces to find out which ones are fast and which ones are not.
• Facebook Secrets Of Web Performance: Todd Hoff of HighScalability.com answers the question, What is Facebook’s secret sauce for managing what’s got to be the biggest Big Data project, if you will, on the Web?
• Nginx Server Speeds Up the Tubes With SPDY Support: The Nginx team has released version 1.4 of the popular web server and reverse proxy. The headline feature in version 1.4 is support for the SPDY protocol.
• Google: ‘We’ll track every task on every data center server’: In a paper, Google engineers presents how it monitors every task on all its servers, located across the world.
• Behind the Scenes: Airbnb Neighborhoods: This is a Q+A with Andy Kramolisch and Ben Hughes of Airbnb about the Neighborhoods project. One of the big challenges? How to deal with lots of data. One of the main recommendations? “It’s important to consider performance from day one.”
• A performance checklist for the mobile web: This is a presentation by Colt McAnlis, Developer Advocate – Google Chrome at the recent HTML5DevConf. Colt supplies a “programmer’s checklist” for building HTML5 apps capable of making smooth transitions from desktop to mobile.

You can also subscribe to these articles

You can also subscribe to these weekly articles and receive them in your email inbox as soon as a new one has been published. Sign up here!

Images via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.