I’ve been on a web tweaking kick lately: how to speed up your javascript, gzip files with your server, and now how to set up caching. But the reason is simple: site performance is a feature.

For web sites, speed may be feature #1. Users hate waiting, we get frustrated by buffering videos and pages that pop together as images slowly load. It’s a jarring (aka bad) user experience. Time invested in site optimization is well worth it, so let’s dive in.

So, we build a web site or an application and want to add search to it, and then it hits us: getting search working is hard. We want our search solution to be fast, we want a painless setup and a completely free search schema, we want to be able to index data simply using JSON over HTTP, we want our search server to be always available, we want to be able to start with one machine and scale to hundreds, we want real-time search, we want simple multi-tenancy, and we want a solution that is built for the cloud.

"This should be easier", we declared, "and cool, bonsai cool".

elasticsearch aims to solve all these problems and more. It is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Lucene.

logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.

Load scripts like images. Use HTML5 and CSS3 safely. Target CSS for different screens, paths, states and browsers. Make it the only script in your HEAD. A concise solution to universal issues.

10 fast fingers lets you test your typing speed. Just start typing and see how fast you can type.
Practice daily and improve your typing speed. Are you faster than everybody else?

Wait.. what?! A keyboard collection? While it may seem like a rather strange hobby, I indeed collect keyboards and related accessories. By now my collection consists of about a hundred keyboards, thousands of keycaps, keyboard cables and a lot more junk. Other people collect stamps, I collect keyboards. Get over it.

The present & future of web fonts is looking awfully bright. Quality and Quantity are increasing, though there are still a few fonts I have to pass over when designing for the web. While I don’t know if all of these are in the pipeline to become web fonts, I have to believe that all type foundries are moving in that direction so that their fonts remain useful. It’s important to note that this shouldn’t be read as a “what’s the holdup” post. Creating high quality web fonts is no simple task. The only thing worse than a font you can’t use on the web is one that can be used but renders poorly.

Cinderella is a fully managed development environment for open source hacking on Mac OSX. It's powered by homebrew and chef. You only need Xcode to get started.
Cinderella builds everything up in ~/Developer. It won't stomp on any of your current installations so you don't have to commit your entire machine immediately. It's simple to rollback if you really want to.

Okay, let’s just assume that you’ve bought into the idea that a happy developer requires a clean, attractive, comfortable workplace that encourages healthy, sustainable productivity.
You don’t want to do this piecemeal. You asked for a big monitor and you got it. Now, you ask for a sit-stand desk, and you’re suddenly the guy who always needs another “toy.”

Visually, there are actually three states a checkbox can be in: checked, unchecked, or indeterminate.

Whether it's computing, photography, cooking, or sports —we all have a set of favorite items for doing what we love. Bagcheck is a fun way to share and discover what's inside our "bags".
Bagcheck was started by a few geeks who love their gear. We realized we're not the only ones that spent lots of time discussing the products we love to use. So we made Bagcheck to allow people to talk about and share lists of the stuff they use and why.

jQuery.fracs determines the fraction of an HTML element that is currently in the viewport, as well as the fraction it takes of the complete viewport and the fraction of the area that might possibly be visible. It also provides the coordinates of the visible rectangle in document, element and viewport space. See the demo to get an impression of some of the features.

Please help us create the definitive resource for this topic. We believe that stackoverflow should not just be a resource for very specific technical questions, but also for general guidelines on how to solve variations on common problems. "Form Based Authentication For Websites" should be a fine topic for such an experiment.

Dive Into Python 3 covers Python 3 and its differences from Python 2. Compared to Dive Into Python, it’s about 20% revised and 80% new material. The book is now complete, but feedback is always welcome.

LiveReload monitors changes in the file system. As soon as you save a file, it is preprocessed as needed, and the browser is refreshed.
Even cooler, when you change a CSS file or an image, the browser is updated instantly without reloading the page.

Baker is an HTML5 ebook framework to publish on the iPad using open web standards

I can’t overstate the value of a good flat, sharp, detailed icon. You can style it any way you please, use it in a variety of projects, and communicate difficult interface concepts in a 16 pixel space. Considering the incredible amount of work that goes into designing each icon, and the quality exhibited below, these sets are scandalously low priced. So get ready to do some serious tax-deductible shopping.

Every now and then, we look around, select fresh free high-quality fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to.
In this selection, we’re pleased to present Tondu, Banda, Morning Glory, Matilde, Bohema, Weston Round Slab, Highlands, Cabin, Linden Hill and other fonts. Please note that while most fonts are available for commercial projects, some are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such in their descriptions. Also, please read the licensing agreements carefully before using the fonts; they may change from time to time.

If you don’t understand the motivation behind Git’s design, you’re in for a world of hurt. With enough flags you can force Git to act the way you think it should instead of the way it wants to. But that’s like using a screwdriver like a hammer; it gets the job done, but it’s done poorly, takes longer, and damages the screwdriver.

A blogging framework for hackers.

Contains lots of comments to help you get going easily. It is truly object-oriented, it implements public and private methods as well as public and private properties, making it the ideal candidate for when building both simple and complex jQuery plugins.

MariaDB is a database server that offers drop-in replacement functionality for MySQL. MariaDB is built by some of the original authors of MySQL, with assistance from the broader community of Free and open source software developers. In addition to the core functionality of MySQL, MariaDB offers a rich set of feature enhancements including alternate storage engines, server optimizations, and patches.

As you probably know, OS X Lion was released yesterday. While there are 250 some odd new features in Lion, what you probably notice first is the new interface design. Part of the new design is new icon buttons in apps like Mail, seen below. I'm going to recreate OS X Lion's buttons in CSS for use in your UI.

Sass makes CSS fun again. Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.

The Wall enables to create an endless grid. You choose the number of elements, The Wall will see to the rest.Every moment you may know the position of your wall or move it where you like better by clicking or dragging it. What could be simpler?

The Lost Type Co-op is a collaboration between Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. It was founded with the intention of providing unique and quality fonts based on a pay-what-you-want model. All designers get 100% of the donations their font receives. 

Sugar is a Javascript library for working with native objects. It is designed to be intuitive, unobtrusive, and let you do more with less code.

Web Typography for the Lonely aims to excite designers about the possibilities of cutting-edge web standards and javascript through beautiful and inspiring typographic explorations.

The concept of permanently placing content on a web page for a single browsing width or resolution is becoming a thing of the past.

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17" laptop screen or an iPhone.

If you’re a regular Mac.AppStorm visitor, then you probably love apps as much as we do. You might even have some ideas floating around in your head for an app that you’d like to build whether for your own purposes or to strike it rich on the Mac App Store.The biggest hurdle to many would-be developers is a complete lack of knowledge of where to even start! How are Mac apps created? What skills are required? Where do I go to learn these skills? Today we’ll find out!

Next we’re going to take a look at 10 popular design patterns that I’ve personally found very useful to apply in JavaScript applications over the years.
Note that there is no ‘ideal’ pattern to use from this selection as developers often use best judgment when deciding on the pattern, which is the best ‘fit’ for their needs.
Each pattern varies in complexity, however I have tried to keep my explanations as simple as possible so that both beginners and intermediate developers can benefit from the material.

One of the topics that I didn't cover in depth in the Pro Git book is the reset command. Most of the reason for this, honestly, is that I never strongly understood the command beyond the handful of specific use cases that I needed it for. I knew what the command did, but not really how it was designed to work.

The world's largest community for exploring, sharing, creating, and promoting data visualizations.

Roots is a starting WordPress theme made for developers that’s based on HTML5 Boilerplate, Blueprint CSS (or 960.gs) and Starkers that will help you rapidly create brochure sites and blogs.

SparkleShare is a collaboration and sharing tool that is designed to keep things simple and to stay out of your way.

Until now, there was not a simple and effective way to design interactive, hardware-accelerated interfaces on the Mac. Core Animation can create hardware-accelerated drawings, but doesn't provide interaction mechanisms. AppKit and NSView have excellent interaction mechanisms, but the drawings operations are CPU-bound, which makes fluid scrolling, animations, and other effects difficult – if not impossible – to accomplish.

Capture, Annotate and ShareCapture the whole page or any portion, annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text, one-click upload to share.

The input form is an essential element of almost any website or application these days. Input is a core method of interaction, and in many cases it represents the hard conversion point between success and failure. With the amount time and effort we put into bringing users to our sign-up and contact forms, it’s surprising that we tend not to spend a proportional amount of time on the forms themselves.
A number of techniques and elements can be used in Web forms to turn them from abject failures into successful conversion points. In this article, we’ll present some interesting examples and useful guidelines for Web form design.

Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.

Whether on your computer or from your phone, Springpad is a free app that helps you remember stuff today so you can make better decisions tomorrow. We automatically organize and enhance what you've saved to help you be more productive.

S8 COMPACT / 9FPS TO 18FPS / AUTO-B / MULTI-CARTRIDGE / DYNAMIC AUDIO / ON-THE-FLY TELECINE / SFX

A Wordpress Development ThemeIt's always a frustrating process starting a Wordpress Theme from scratch. You always end up grabbing code snippets from a bunch of different themes and your site files usually end up looking like a jumbled mess of borrowed code and band-aids. Even if you start with a framework, sometimes you just want to be able to get in there and mess with the actual markup. Sometimes it's overly complicated, but it doesn't have to be.

Sucker for Soccer

Dribbble is a fantastic place for designers to share their works in progress, and is also a great place for designers to gain inspiration and pick out recurring trends across the design spectrum. This post rounds up a collection of snapshots of rich interface design elements from both website designs and app designs. Each one has been carefully crafted for its detail, use of textures, subtle lighting effects and various tones & colours.

24 days of killer demos, tutorials, community buzz, and other stuff that Steve Jobs would love

Phabricator is a suite of web applications that help teams communicate about software effectively. It was developed at Facebook, and is used by more than 500 engineers to review, discuss, track and share changes every day (maybe fewer on weekends and holidays).

Imbalance 2 turns you WordPress-based website to an attractive blog, portfolio or even online magazine. This free template designed in strict modern style with a minimalistic touch. Imbalance 2 can easily fresh up your web-magazine or blog. Due to modern flexible features and layout Imbalance 2 fits to almost any project and your visitors won’t remain indifferent.

yowayowa camera woman = natsumi
Lives in Tokyo with two cats.
Photographs mainly levitating self-portraits (and cats not levitating).
yowayowa is a Japanese term meaning "weak" or "feeble."

Along with HTML5 Boilerplate's rock solid commitment to cross-browser consistency, H5BP brings you delicious documentation, a site optimizing build script, and a custom boilerplate builder. In addition to this, we now support lighttpd, Google App Engine, and NodeJS with optimized server configurations (along with Apache, Nginx, and IIS) and we've reduced the overall size of the published boilerplate by 50%.

Open Atrium is a team collaboration tool with a kick of open source hotness.

So you’ve finally decided to make the switch from Apache to Nginx. You most likely did this for performance reasons; perhaps all those blogs have been writing about how fast Nginx is or perhaps your webmaster friends have been raving about how they can now handle a lot more traffic without spending money on hardware.

Just a list of 20 (now 24) little-known tools for the command line -- I hope you find something useful that you weren't aware of yet! Use your operating system's package manager to install most of them. (Thanks for the tips, everybody!)

Websites for iPhone and iPad apps are always great fodder for creative inspiration as the projects often allow for the designers to go to town and create a beautiful design to promote the app. This showcase rounds up 35 of the most outstanding iPad app websites. Common traits include large imagery of the iPad device, subtle textures and plenty of white space around well presented content.

In Pokkisam blog inspiration week series today we glad to present Typography inspirations. This is the post of daily / weekly inspirations for your present and future works.These images are selected by pokkisam team.

Welcome. You've reached the central repository for cheat, the RubyGem which puts cheat sheets right into your terminal.

Terminal window for Cygwin and MSYS

Back in July last year I wrote about our migration from MySQL to MongoDB. We have been running MongoDB in production for our server monitoring service, Server Density, since then – 8 months – and have learnt quite a few things about it. These are the kind of things that you only experience once you reach a certain level of usage and it is surprising how few issues we’ve had. Where a problem or bug has cropped up, it has been quickly resolved/fixed by the MongoDB dev team; so we’re very happy.

So you've made it through Git 102, and you wanted more. Git 102 was more of a justification for some of git's trickery, and a way for me to express my philosophies for using version control. Now that you're through with that, let's see if we can figure out some of git's less known features.

Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined set of hues based on fixed color wheel relationships. It has been tested extensively in real world use on color calibrated displays (as well as uncalibrated/intentionally miscalibrated displays) and in a variety of lighting conditions.

This article describes how to make cross-browser requests, in all browsers (including IExplorer 6), without using a proxy or JSONP (which is limited and awkward) -- as long as you control the destination server, or if the destination server allows.

In my previous post I discussed a git workflow for small teams. After repeating that long process for every new feature that needs to be developed, you might find yourself cutting corners and skipping parts of the process (I know I did). Why not take the best of both worlds and have a bulletproof workflow while still being lazy?

Lectures, Screencasts and conferences for real web developers & designers

Slideshows or sliders are obviously a popular trend right now in the web design world – and for good reason. It’s an effective way to highlight something important and create some visual interest. And from a technology standpoint, the popularity of jQuery has made it almost too easy to implement a slideshow. It seems like there is a new jQuery slider plugin released every week. If you’re thinking about incorporating a slideshow in your next web project, we’ve got some inspiration for you. Here are 30 Inspiring Examples of Slideshows in Web Design.

How about syntax checking your work before issuing a commit? I’m sure you know how it feels when those tiny last minute changes - hey it needs no testing! – just break your app after deployment.

If git is your version control system of choice, make sure you don’t miss the pre-commit hook feature, which was designed to run (tada!) pre-commit tasks: typically for syntax checks to avoid such errors leaking into the repository.

Your Ultimate Guide to the
Non - Relational Universe!

CSS3 Buttons is a simple framework to create good-looking GitHub style button links.

Graylog2 is an open source log management solution that stores your logs in MongoDB. It consists of a server written in Java that accepts your syslog messages via TCP, UDP or AMQP and stores it in the database. The second part is a web interface that allows you to manage the log messages from your web browser. Take a look at the screenshots or the latest release info page to get a feeling of what you can do with Graylog2.

As a software engineer, you might want any number of things out of your job - a steady paycheck, the opportunity to work on interesting projects, a springboard to the next better job, or maybe you just like hanging out with other programmers. But by "effective", I mean the ability to complete projects in a timely manner with the expected quality. After working on dozens of software releases, I believe the following practices will bring you there, and while they may involve sticking your neck out, I'd like to think they will also advance your professional reputation, career longevity, and personal satisfaction.

To help you save some time I have come up with the list of 35 free creative PSD website templates which truly reflects the fusion between latest design trends and creativity. Hit a jump, if you’re curious to check out some of the best Free PSD website templates that might help you in picking one for your personal or commercial use. How about appreciating the creativity of the web designers? Don’t forget to comment and if you feel I have missed out any which deserves a mention, share with us.

Since starting with Pegasus, I've become more and more familiar with the Git version control system. I actually use it for my own projects instead of Mercurial now, because I've gotten so much more comfortable with it. One thing that bothered me for a long time about our Git workflow, however, was how messy it was. We are all habitual committers (as I feel we should be) so when we finish a feature we often have 20 or 30 commits behind it. When we merged the feature into master, those commits were weaved into the other commits on master, making it very difficult to read the master commit log over time and making it even more difficult to roll back a change if we needed to. We also did a lot of development right on top of the master branch, which often let things slip into production before they were ready.

Thankfully, someone on Twitter shared a great link to a blog post on a Git workflow using rebase (thanks to Chris Edgemon for finding the original link for me). After reading up on t

Let’s start with this: Git is mind-blowingly amazing and simple. We’ll get back to this later.

Moving on though, a while back I was combing through my feed reader and found a post that leapt up at me: Deployment Script Spring Cleaning by Chris Wanstrath over at Github. It amazed me that no one had thought of doing this before. That is, using git as the deployment strategy for Capistrano.

A game with a single objective: avoid colliding with the red dots.
You can activate a boosts by picking up the rare green dots.

Sounds simple, eh? If only... Give it a try!

I’m a typeface geek, and when it comes to selecting a font I’ll stare at all day, I tend to be pretty picky. Recently, when I discovered that a friend was using a sub par typeface (too horrible to name here) for his Terminal and coding windows, my jaw dropped, my heart sank a little, and I knew it was due time for me to compose this article.

What follows is a round-up of the top 10 readily-available monospace fonts. Many of these fonts are bundled along with modern operating systems, but most are free for download on the web. A few, notably Consolas, are part of commercial software.