There is a video of his recent talk in a technology conference where he spoke about how web performance is important and also shared his experience on handling these issues, mainly about his experiences in WordPress and how the need for speed is really important.

Matt first talked about how WordPress handles the 404 – aka Not Found page – causes a lot of performance overhead due to the fact that the 404 page generated by WordPress is apparently database driven, unlike other static 404 pages. Matt also talked about how easy for developer to create a WordPress plug-in and how these millions of plug-ins can contribute to the performance issue by introducing redundancies: multiple and identical javascript file inclusions in the HTML header. Therefore WordPress created a new function for plug-in developers as a way to eliminate these redundancies.

He also spoke about how a millisecond can save time of people around the world collectively. He took a real example of his website WordPress.com where millions of bloggers have been using as their blog sites and explained how a small performance efficiency or improvement can indirectly promote a more eco-friendly environment: saving servers processing time thus less power consumption.

Interesting issue he raised is also on his experience when WordPress made a total revamp of its user interface and apparently they faced a lot of issues when viewed on Internet Explorer which I believe most web developers have been having as a painful and frustrating task which we are forced to conform .

He also highlighted a few times on his favourite quote by Joe Clark that reads “We’ve upped our standards, up yours” which was coined at the beginning of the adoption of web standards. Anyway, check the video below for a full coverage of his talk.

The Kindle DX

Amazon just launched of its first dedicated e-reader Kindle DX for newspapers and magazines signifying that digital and analogue publishing is beginning to merge. Unfortunately the $489 gadget is currently only available in black and white.

However, for colour version of such e-ink technology, Flepia is the one and available but it does not come cheap with retail price at $1,000 in Japan. The downside is that Flepia has a too slow refresh rate (1.8 seconds), users have to use a stylus to turn pages and its user interface is no-frill, no-fun and non-intuitive.

And it looks like all the media are rushing to be part of this revolutionary gadget as The New York Times and the Washington Post announced that they will launch pilots editions on Kindle DX this summer. Although some question its consistent popularity by the fact that mobiles are already a true alternative to paper.

Nevertheless this is ultimately a good milestone to cease the use of paper that has resulted in vast deforestation. I definitely hope this is just the beginning of a long and hopeful journey for a better world. But for news/book readers, this is definitely a gadget to look for.

Click here to read more about the news.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets.

If you are familiar with friendster and facebook, well I guess this is just another social networking site with different sets of features, in my opinion. I might be wrong but I’ll find out about Twitter more and let you know more in this post.

Well if you’re new to blogging and wish to publicise your blog, you may want to make full use of Twitter to expand your network. And to do that, as usual you need to register to the site to create a new account. Registration is quick and easy, despite of having to verify/authenticate your email. But yeah that is it! And Twitter is ready for you.

Ok now I have my blog and my twitter and wish to publicise myself via these media. Well I think it’s really a hassle to maintain two sites with probably the same posting and I simply do not have the luxury to spare. Luckily just found a service which saves me time from doing the task. This service is called twitterfeed. It gives you the convenience to feed your blog entry to the twitter automatically with just a few mouse clicks and keyboard press.

All you need to do is to sign up, authenticate to your twitter account, and finally add your blog rss feed url as one of your feeds. That’s it! and your twitterfeed is ready to feed your twitter with your blog entries regularly.

I have heard of Mono ages back and of its unstability, but I may be wrong to those experienced Mono users. Well, I guess Mono is getting better as the community grows bigger and commercially supported by Novell to run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Furthermore, now one of the most famous provider of controls for .NET, Telerik, has been working with Mono to release their AJAX controller to incorporate with Mono. Click here to read more.

I think I’ll be eye-ing for this project from now.