Tag Archives: Shoemoney

Saving Bandwidth with Google Ajax Libraries API

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The News

I first heard about the new Google AJAX Libraries API from Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog.  He mentions using it to reduce WordPress bandwidth, but really it can be used to reduce bandwidth in most AJAX based web development environments.

The Exciting Part

I persoanlly use prototype the most, and I’m extremely excited that I can use their libraries instead of uploading my own for each site.  I’m especially excited that calling specific version numbers is possible.  This makes upgrading a code set extremely simple, especially if you call the code version as a variable at the beginning of your code.

Realistically your javascript code is probably one of the lightest weight parts of your code, but every little bit helps, especially if you’re serving a large amount of users every month.

Optional Settings

Script Compression

I think one of the greatest optional settings for all of the scripts you can load is compression.  It’s not available for all of the APIs, but it is for most.  What it does is remove all of the whitespace from the API to reduce file size for the end user – increasing speed.  If you mix that with something like the javascript compiling on Google Chrome and you’ll have lightning fast AJAX applications.

No CSS

You can optionally remove the CSS from the scripts you’re remotly loading, which allows you to do one of three things: load the default CSS, load your own CSS, or not load the CSS at all.

Resources

WordPress.org: Google AJAX Libraries API Plugin – This plugin uses the GALA whereever possible in your WordPress installation.

Google AJAX APIs Blog – This is a great place to go if this really iterests you and you’ll be using this code regularly.  They’re always adding new scripts to the API, so if you don’t see the one you want yet, keep an eye on their blog.

I’m going to Affiliate Summit West 2009.

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Thanks Shoe

I just picked up some passes for Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Las Vegas courtesy of Shoemoney.  Thanks Shoe, I appreciate it.  I hope to see you there.  I’ll buy you a drink or two if I see you.

Background and Information

affiliate-summitAffiliate Summit is a great affordable conference for people just coming into affiliate marketing, because there is such a low barrier to entry (cost).  Overall the conference gets pretty good reviews, although I hear that after a while, you get used to – or tired of – listening to the same sessions all the time.  I’m looking at the session schedule and couldn’t imagine being able to visit the entire show floor as well as every session in just one visit.  I’ll try though.  It looks like there will be upwards of 3,000 people attending and a ton of exhibitors.

What am I getting from this?

I think there are three major things I’m going for:

  1. I need something that resembles a vacation, and I think this is it.  This is a good way to expense some R&R to the company.
  2. I’d love the chance to meet some of the major players in the industry and do some networking.
  3. I know I have a lot to learn, and I think this will give me a barometer as to how much.

The Cost vs. Return

This is my first big conference, so I’m pretty excited.  I booked my flight and room and the Rio for just over $1200 with my travel agent.  I’ll be there from the 9th until the 13th.  If I didn’t win them, conference passes would have cost $700 more than that.  I would imagine that I will spend at least $1000 additional to that while I’m there.  On top of all of that, I will be missing 4 work days, with reduced productivity at best, reducing my normal income.

All in all, adjusted for R&R, I think I need to probably get a return of about $3,000 to break even, and we all know business isn’t about breaking even.  I think I can do it pretty easily.

I plan to cover the event and give updates every night (or maybe the morning after).  I’ll see you there!

What is XFN?

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XFN is a guideline for linking on websites. It uses the “rel” tag to identify information about a link. Most commonly, the rel tag is used for “nofollow,” which is a technique for preventing search engines from following a link on your website. XFN uses this attribute to add information about the RELationship between the source of the link and it’s target. XFN only applies to people currently, and Google as well as other companies are developing software that maps this data and uses it to create useful information.

I was just reading the ShoeMoney blog, and stumbled across this video:

I think that XFN is a very exciting new technique that can be used to enrich the internet in a bunch of ways.