Today, I have had enough, and so decided to go find some Firefox optimization tips that will help to speed up my Firefox. The following are 3 simple steps to make your Firefox fast again, consolidated from sources as listed at the bottom of this post.

Hope you’ll find this reference useful, and FYI, my Firefox is amazingly fast again!

1. Optimize Firefox Database

• Menu > Tools > Error Console
• Paste the following in the Code box, press “Evaluate”, and wait.

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");

This vacuums the SQLite database, and is the most significant in speeding up Firefox! Remember to do this periodically.

2. Limit Your History Sizes

• Menu > Preferences (Mac) / Options (Windows) > Privacy Tab
• Set “Remember my browsing history for at least ? days” to a small number. Personally, I set mine to 10.

As for “Download History”, I also unchecked the option, because I have no need for it.

3. Change Settings in About:Config

• Type about:config in your urlbar.
• In the Filter box, search for the following names and edit them accordingly.

Browsing and Session Settings

browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo

A positive integer indicating how many window closures to remember for later possible restoration. (Default is 3)

Suggestion: Reduce to 1

browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo

A positive integer indicating how many tab closures to remember for later possible restoration. (Default is 10)

Suggestion: Reduce to 4

browser.sessionhistory.max_entries

Number of pages stored in the history of your browsing session. Basically these are pages that can be reached using your Back and Forward buttons. (Default is 50)

Suggestion: Reduce to 10

browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

A non-negative integer corresponding to the maximum number of entries that can appear in the Location Bar auto-complete dropdown. (Default is 12)

Suggestion: Reduce to 6

browser.sessionstore.interval

A positive integer indicating the number of milliseconds between session saving operations. (Default is 10000, or 10 seconds)

Suggestion: Increase to 150000, or 2.5min

Networking Settings

network.http.max-connections

This integer preference takes values between 1 and 65535 inclusive, directly corresponding to the maximum number of HTTP connections Mozilla can have open at once. (Default is 30).

Suggestion: Increase to 48 or 96

network.http.max-connections-per-server

This preference takes values between 1 and 255 inclusive, directly corresponding to the maximum number of HTTP connections Mozilla can have open at once. (Default is 15)

Suggestion: Increase to 24

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

This preference takes values between 1 and 255 inclusive, directly corresponding to the maximum number of HTTP keep-alive connections the application can have open at once to a single server. (Default is 6)

Suggestion: Increase to 12

network.http.pipelining

Attempt to use pipelining in HTTP 1.1 connections

Suggestion: Change to TRUE

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Any integer from 1 to 8 inclusive determines the maximum number of requests to pipeline at once. A value of 1 disables pipelining. (Default is 4)

Suggestion: Increase to 8

Resources

• Vacuum Firefox Databases For Better Performance, Now With No Restart
• Speed Up Firefox By Limiting History Size
• Optimize Firefox’s Memory Usage By Tweaking Session Preferences
• The Ultimate Guide To Speeding Up Firefox 3.5

What is “Customer Service”? According to Wikipedia:

.. is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.

Customer service is also a business strategy, and providing excellent customer service is key to growing a business. Since, such a strategy definitely helps to retain your existing customers and to grow your customers base through word of mouth.

That’s definitely one of the oldest trick in any marketing reference, but do all businesses care about customer service?

Given that I am in the web industry, do all websites care about customer service?

Customer Service = User Experience

In the web context, I simply equate customer service to user experience, since both serve the same purpose of ensuring that a customer / user is happy with a product or service.

Therefore, for websites to succeed, providing excellent user experience should be of the utmost priority, as this can lead to more returning visitors, and more new visitors (by word of mouth). Websites win when they have a high volume of visitors, as monetization is always easy when there’s traffic.

As simple as the logic sounds.. However, many websites fail in user experience design, and users suffer as a result. Luckily, there are always alternatives (or clones!) to any website, and so suffering users can be unforgiving and simply go to an alternative with a better user experience design.

A simple conclusion from this is that websites should always focus most of their resources on creating a wonderful user experience in order to retain and grow the traffic.

I Don’t Really Care

I hear you say: “Ultimately, our website survives on advertising revenue. I don’t care about user experience, and I’ll just focus on getting more advertisers.”

Hmm.. Who will want to advertise with you when all of your users have left for another website with a better user experience? Probably there isn’t such “another” website now, but that means you are always vulnerable to that possibility, right?

Google: The Case Study

Take Google as an example. Their main source of revenue is from advertising too, but do they only focus their resources in getting more advertisers? The answer is: No. Google is constantly evolving their search and results interface, in order to give their users a great user experience. Imagine that Google has a small search box with multiple options, and ads and sponsored links are everywhere (above the fold, eye-leveled, etc) in their search results making it difficult to discern real content from ads. Will you like it? Will you search for alternatives that offer you a much better user experience?

The point is, Google knows what users want. Google neither assumes nor imagines what users want. Commonly known as actual usage vs. perceived usage. A user’s objective when visiting Google is simply to ask, learn, compare and leave, and that’s what Google is enabling all users to do, quickly. They display the search results clearly and prominently, and there are minimal distractions in terms of ads and options that would obstruct a user’s objective.

In terms of each search result content, Google doesn’t try to show you everything they know too. They display just enough crucial information that can either pique your interest, or help you make comparisons and draw conclusions. Essentially, displaying more information doesn’t always equate to easier evaluation of results. Haven’t you heard of information-overload? And when more information is actually more useless information, that’s even worse!

Features, that’s part of user experience too. Don’t get carried away with including all the features into the UI, or with adding the next-new-shiny-feature which was seen on another website. Again, understand who your users are and what your users want. Are they mostly power users or first-timers? Do they use all the existing features? Do they need the next new feature? Always measure and evaluate the effectiveness of every feature. Kill the ones that only serves as distraction to your users, or even worse, as distractions to your development team as they need to spend time to maintain something that only contributes to 1% traffic. Google have done so, by publicly announcing that they will stop all developments on Google NoteBook, and in this context, although it’s more like killing off a product rather than a feature, the idea permeates.

Even though I have been using Google exclusively in my examples, that’s not to say Google is perfect. They are not, but Google has demonstrated successfully that devoting resources to user experience is worth the effort. Even till today, they are constantly measuring and improving their UI to give all of us a greater user experience.

User Experience Is Important

Anyway, so you have accepted the premise that user experience is important. What should you do now?

Eat your own dog food. Imagine that you are a first-timer to your website and go through all the entry points to your website. Does your website helps you, as a first-timer, to answer, learn, compare and draw conclusions to your questions from these entry points?

That’s not enough.

Ask your employees the same question. They are your best assets even before you should consider seeking advice from a consultant.

Ask your users the same question. They are the ones who are using your website! Gather as much feedback as possible from your users, through feedback boxes easily accessible from every page of your website, and reply to your users in a timely manner, as that’s user support and is a part of user experience too.

The purpose of all these? To understand your users, and so to be able to create a wonderful user experience that users want and users like.

That’s basic customer service, you know.

My goal is to set up a private repository for my own WordPress theme, so that I’ll have version control and a complete change log for all developmental work on the theme. Another benefit in this is that I can sync the theme easily with my WordPress install, without having to do any FTP uploads (while figuring out which files were changed).

To set up Git repositories on Dream is actually quite easy, and I’ll recount how I did it. In the shell code examples below, USER refers to your user name on Dreamhost, while EXAMPLE.COM refers to your domain.

Step 1: Create A Dreamhost Repository

Firstly, I created a sub-domain to store my repositories, and I used .htaccess to protect it from the general public.

Both of these can be done from the Dreamhost Panel by following these two wikis:

1. Adding A Subdomain To Your Dreamhost Account
2. Configuring .htaccess

Then I entered shell, browsed to the sub-domain which I created in the step above, and created an empty repository with these commands:

$ mkdir my_wp_theme.git
$ cd my_wp_theme.git
$ git --bare init
$ git --bare update-server-info

Step 2: Create A Local Repository

Next, I created a local repository on my development machine, which will be later published to the Dreamhost repository.

$ mkdir my_wp_theme
$ cd my_wp_theme
$ git init

Configure the local repository with the Dreamhost repository details.

$ git config.default matching
$ git remote add origin ssh://USER@EXAMPLE.COM/home/USER/SUB.EXAMPLE.COM/my_wp_theme.git
$ git config branch.master.remote origin
$ git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

Step 3: Push The Contents

Following which, I copied over my WordPress theme files into this local repository. Then I added, committed and pushed my changes.

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initialization."
$ git push --all
$ git pull

Step 4: Sync With WordPress Install

To sync with my WordPress install, I browsed to <wordpress>/wp-content/themes and cloned the repository.

git clone ssh://USER@EXAMPLE.COM/home/USER/SUB.EXAMPLE.COM/my_wp_theme.git

Then I went into the WordPress Admin and activated this gitorised theme. Done!

In the future, when I am finished with any changes to my theme, all I have to do is: Push my changes, then pull the changes on the server.

Back then, I merely shared my script on Google Reader’s Google Group, but I got an encouraging reply from David Chartier who was then a blogger for Download Squad. Soon, the script got a dedicated post on Download Squad, written by Jason Clarke. Surprise, surprise! After which, more people came to know of the script, and it was delicious-ed a total of 144 times. By the following day, I was listed on Techmeme. Wow! Techmeme! Have you EVER been listed on Techmeme?!

Anyway, I soon neglected the maintenance of the script due to other commitments, but a few others continued to make further improvements to my Greasemonkey script. Eventually, the functionality of the script was acknowledged by Gina of Lifehacker, and one of the improved version was included into the Better Gmail Firefox extension. Even though I was not named as the author of the script, but I was still able to see that I was credited in the comments section of the script, and that’s good enough for me.

Just an egoistic post to document one of my (lesser-known) greater achievements, and I wonder if I’ll ever achieve such “fame” again.

What about you? What’s your claim to fame?

First, the problem.

The thing I dread most with opening my inbox every morning is that it’s always flooded with (duh?) emails. The speed at which emails are being sent nowadays is astonishing! After every night, my inbox is usually packed with emails from colleagues, partners, applications (automated notification), newsletters, spam and others. That’s a night’s worth, so consider my feelings after a long weekend.

Anyway, just for the record, I LOVE to adopt a zero-inbox policy, and I archive my emails VERY, VERY LIBERALLY, so if my inbox is teeming with 30-40 unread mails, that’s considered “full” or “flooded” to me. =)

To tackle the flood, I started with filters and that helped, but I am still not satisfied. Every morning, I’ll start the day in my inbox and traverse down the long, long list of unread emails to read, reply, archive or delete. However, at any single point in time, I’ll only know the number of unread emails I still have in my inbox, and no further details about these emails. Hmm.. Is there anything that I can do?

And now, the solution.

An idea struck me this morning, and I decided to give it a try. After tinkling with Greasemonkey scripting and Gmail’s Greasemonkey API for a while, I present to you: Gmail Unreads Summary!

The features of this Greasemonkey script are:

• Summary of unread emails in your current view.
• Emails are grouped by sender, with unread count.
• Every group is a quick link to filter emails by sender.
• Easy to use!

Download Now!

Anyway, my original intention is to create a summary for ALL the unread emails in your account. However, it’s impossible to get all that information from the client-side? Therefore, as a workaround, the summary view is only for the CURRENT VIEW which you are looking at, and the summary changes when you paginates or change views.

Give it a try! Any feedbacks? Would you like to see any other summary details?

Hmm.. I wonder if this is worthy of Gmail Labs..

Update (20-08-2009)
I have removed the “Close” functionality and replaced it with a “Toggle” functionality. This is because the “Close” functionality is buggy (as it used a GM value?) when installed as a Firefox extension. Download the script again. Thank you!

Update (29-08-2009)
I have made some bug fixes to the script to improve your overall user experience. Firstly, search urls will now make an in-browser refresh and not a full-browser refresh. Secondly. emails with “+” are now searchable too. Download the updated script. Thank you!

Update (30-08-2009)
As reported by users, the “minimize” functionality is not sticky after changing views. Therefore I have updated the script to ensure that your preference is remembered. Download the updated script. Thank you!

Update (11-09-2009)
This script has been integrated into the Firefox add-on: Better Gmail 2 since Aug 18th. Thanks to Gina of Lifehacker!

Update (20-09-2009)
This script has been removed from the Better Gmail 2 extension since version 0.9.4 because I am using a new Greasemonkey function (@require) which is somewhat incompatible with the extension. Please install this as a Greasemonkey script instead.

Update (26-11-2009)
The Gmail Greasemonkey API broke (possibly due to changes within Gmail itself), which caused the Greasemonkey script to stop functioning. I have just fixed the bug, so go ahead and download the updated version. Thank you!

Update (16-02-2010)
The Gmail Greasemonkey API broke again. I have fixed two of the broken functions, but not the third, and so, my script has lost the functionality of “auto-refresh”. However, I have added a “Refresh” link, so that refresh can still be done manually. Hopefully this is a good-enough fix for now. Please download the updated script. Thank you.

Update (21-02-2010)
In this update, I have renamed the “Refresh” link in the last update to “Refresh GMUS” and have shifted its position – putting it just beside Gmail’s own “Refresh” view link. Download the updated script now. Enjoy!

Currently, FriendFeed is doing a wonderful job in aggregating all my online services, and so I will continue to leverage on this core functionality. However, at the same time, I want to categorize my online activities and target them to different audiences, and hopefully with this categorization, I’ll have answered the three questions above.

Starting with this blog, I shall continue to do my geeky writings on Winston{YW} since that has been the main focus of this blog. Moreover, I already have a few geeky posts here that are ranked highly in Google searches and these posts continue to bring in a stream of fellow-geeks, whom I suppose are only interested in other geeky writings.

In addition, I am going to create a multimedia blog, which will contain my very own images, videos and sounds. Posterous seems to be the oh-so perfect choice for this, as I can simply email my multimedia files to the service and my files will be magically converted and hosted intelligently, as an image gallery, or a video/music player! That’s really simple, as compared to a self-hosted WordPress blog.

For a start, I’ll be using Posterous as a replacement for Twitpic, since this service is able to auto-post to Twitter (and other services) and it’s a nicer archives of my images. Next, I’ll be posting random photos taken with my (newly-bought!) Panasonic Lumix LX3 onto Posterous too.

Posts from these two blogs will be fed into FriendFeed, along with services such as Twitter, Delicious and Google Reader for an aggregated and commentable view. Unless you are not subscribed to me on FriendFeed, you are probably already overwhelmed by my activities-stream.

However, I know that not everyone gets FriendFeed, and you might only be interested in my blog/s. Therefore, I’ll be offering not one, not two, but THREE RSS feeds:

• The 1st feed is for this blog.
• The 2nd feed is for my multimedia blog at Posterous.
• The 3rd (default) feed is a combined feed of the two feeds above, courtesy of Yahoo Pipes.

As for Twitter, I’ll continue to use it to stream my daily life, retweet interesting tweets, share funny videos and socialize with the crowd. Are you interested in “stalking” me? Join Twitter and Follow Me. That is where I am spending most of my time.

What about my Facebook? I have installed the Selective Twitter app on Facebook, so that any tweets with a hashtag of #fb will be piped into Facebook as well. In this way, I’ll also be able to interact with my Facebook friends when I tweet.

That’s the gist of my online strategy for now, and as trivial as it sounds, I actually spent quite some time mulling over it. Let’s see how my plan will evolve over time..

Do you have an online strategy of your own?

About two weeks ago, I received an update that their server operations will be shifted from the US to Singapore by the end of the month, and that they will be migrating my account and continuing to provide me with free hosting. Wow! That’s really very nice, considering the fact that I am a “free customer”.

Nevertheless, I felt that all good things must come to an end, and that I really shouldn’t continue to leech on them since they are operating a business. Moreover, I am no longer a part of the business, and so rightly, I should move my butt elsewhere. Therefore, I thanked them for their goodwill and declined their offer.

Thanks for the 3+ years of free hosting. Thank you!

Anyway, so having decided that I am going to shift my butt elsewhere, I set out to look for an awesome web host. Actually, I already have a web host in mind, and thanks to an affiliate code from Chu Yeow, I migrated this blog to DreamHost on 8th July. The migration was simple, and I even made use of the opportunity to upgrade my WordPress to version 2.8.1 (which was further upgraded to 2.8.2 using the fantastic one-click upgrade feature).

Till now, I am a satisfied customer of DreamHost, and these are some of the things that I really like so far:

• The Control Panel is easy to use and configure.
• They have a brilliant customer support system in the form of a Wiki.
• To connect to SSH/FTP/MySQL, server alias is simply [protocol].[hostname].
• Transparent status updates at: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

Now that I am on paid hosting, I must continue to blog (more , more!) and try to make some returns on investment, so expect to hear more from me!

Step 1: Download Dependencies

There are dependencies that’s required for the install of Git. Let’s get them via apt-get.

sudo apt-get build-dep git-core

Note: If apt-get fails at some point to install the dependencies, update it and retry.

sudo apt-get update

Step 2: Download Git

Download the latest version of Git. I use wget, but it’s really up to personal preference.

wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.0.4.tar.gz

Step 3: Make and Install Git

Simply execute the following commands to unpack, compile and install Git.

gunzip git-1.6.0.4.tar.gz
tar -xvf git-1.6.0.4.tar
cd git-1.6.0.4
./configure
make && sudo make install

That’s all to get started with Git on your Ubuntu (or Linux) servers. Enjoy!

Basically, the libraries are hosted on the Google infrastructure and common obstacles such as caching and gzipping of these Ajax libraries are handled by the Google engineers. The API is also kept up-to-date with the latest stable release of each Ajax library, and by default, serves the minified version. Of course, there’s also an option to use an uncompressed version for development purposes.

As my WordPress is on shared hosting, I don’t have the luxury of setting up a cache or gzipping my files, and so there’s always been a performance issue with my blog. Therefore, any form of optimization could go a long way in making my blog’s loading experience more pleasant, and so I figured that the Google Ajax Libraries API should be able to help in some way; moreover, Google has a wide CDN and their servers are fast.

To use Google’s Ajax Libraries API is simple, as illustrated on Google’s Ajax Search API blog and Ajaxian, and I made the switch in just 5 minutes for the jQuery framework which I am using on this blog.

Previously, I was including the jQuery packed script which was hosted on my domain, but now I am including the Google’s Ajax Libraries API:

<!-- Previously -->
<!-- <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js"> --> <!-- Google's Ajax API -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>

Why was I using the packed version? Because, I cannot do gzip on my shared hosting and without that, the packed version is smaller in size as compared to the minified version.

In my other external javascript file that contains my jQuery codes, this was how it looked like:

$(function(){ //Line 1 //Line 2 //...
})

Now, I need to first load jQuery using the API which has smart versioning feature, then replace jQuery’s DOM ready function with Google’s on page load function. The internals, or codes, remain the same.

google.load("jquery", "1");
google.setOnLoadCallback(function(){ //Line 1 //Line 2 //...
});

That’s it! I am done! Testing the response time via YSLOW with Firebug:

• jQuery on www.winstonyw.com: Average of 700ms, 31K (No gzip)
• jQuery on Google: Average of 150ms, 16.7K (With gzip)

Are you going to make the switch and improve your users’ experience?

We now live in the era of feeds, where most web applications you use can produce some kind of RSS/Atom feed. In turn, these feeds can be inputs to other web applications of varied uses, such as Google Reader or FriendFeed.

Blog Feed

The first application that comes to mind when we talk about feeds would be blogs. Taking WordPress as an example, WordPress blogs produce RSS and Atom feeds. These feeds are then usually included in the HTML Head element of the blog as follows:

<head> <!-- Meta Tags --> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" /> <link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
</head>

Note the definition of the Link element and its significance:

Link elements with a rel value of “alternate” are used to describe an alternate representation of the content of the current web page, and these defined relationships and help your site attract and retain visitors.

Burning Your Blog Feed

However, we all know of a great service at FeedBurner that can provide you with amazing control over your vanilla feeds, and so, most of the blogs I know ADVERTISE a FeedBurner feed rather than (or alongside) the prepackaged feeds.

Feed Discovery

What do I mean by “ADVERTISE”? Usually, a prominent subscribe link to a FeedBurner feed can be found on blogs, but the FeedBurner feed is NOT exposed in the HTML Head element. This impedes accurate feed discovery, and readers of these blogs, if using some feed discovery application, may subscribe to one of the exposed vanilla feeds instead of the “hidden” FeedBurner feed. To the content-producer, this implies a lost of feed-viewership analytics and possibly even revenue.

Experiment 1

To illustrate, I use this Greasemonkey script: Smart Google Reader Subscribe Button by Mihai which places an unobtrusive RSS icon in the upper-right corner of the browser, allowing easy subscription to RSS feeds that are discovered on any site.

Suppose I include my FeedBurner feed in the HTML Head element, the script would be able to discover two feeds. However, when I exclude my FeedBurner feed from the HTML Head element, the script would only be able to discover one feed.

Experiment 2

For a more conclusive example, let’s try using FireFox to subscribe to a blog feed. Again, we first test with the FeedBurner feed included, then excluded from the HTML Head element.

As you can see, in the first setting, the FeedBurner feed was discovered and marked to be subscribed (via Google). However, in the second setting, the vanilla RSS feed was discovered, and this is definitely not what content-producers would like to see happening.

Do Your Own Experiments

Still skeptical? Test this out in Google Reader or even the Google Ajax Feed API to see which feed is discovered from your blog. There are also other feed discovery services out there which you can use to test my hypothesis, but the result would probably be the same, and the reasoning similar: Only feeds that are linked, or exposed in the HTML Head element can be easily discovered.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we should realise the importance of facilitating feed discovery and its implications to content-indexing and traffic analytics. Remember to expose your FeedBurner feed in your WordPress blog today, like so:

<head> <!-- Meta Tags --> <link rel="alternate" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/winstonyw" type="application/rss+xml" title="FeedBurner RSS Feed"/>
</head>