Keep an eye on your blog performance

While writing your blog, it is easy to get carried away with images, videos, and the like. The result - slower load times and not a pretty experience as you start accumulating users. Since Google penalizes slower load times, this is not good news from any perspective.

There are tools that can help you overcome this issue. While some of them are available as browser plugins, some like PageSpeed are provided by Google. gtmetrix is one of the better tools that piggy backs on the "proven" frameworks to get you a reliable picture.

gtmetrix combines the goodness of YSlow (from Yahoo!) and PageSpeed (from Google), and provides a good overview. Without ever registering you can view how your blog/website fares from the eyes of PageSpeed or YSlow, for free. You can easily see what the performance is, rankings for your website and the reason for the rankings. gtmetrix also provides some solutions, but I would suggest looking around the web to narrow down to your exact solution.
One of the more interesting parts however is the ability to compare different blogs/websites. This provides an easy way to check how you compare against the competition or other blogs.

Get a large font collection for your PC

Earlier posts have dealt with web fonts a bit. Web fonts are just beautiful for your website, blog and then some, but sooner rather than later you will get to a point where you need better fonts than what Windows operating system can offer. This may be for your next document, presentation or anything which has a dependency on your desktop/laptop system.

Getting newer fonts for your PC is not a big issue, but getting fonts that look good and are from a trust worthy source certainly is. So then, how about getting at least a 1000 fonts for <$20? The website claims to source fonts from the designers, and share that with the consumers. With the big number of fonts on the offer, you are more likely to find one that suits your needs without ever leaving your computer. Go ahead, browse through the list of fonts and decide for yourself.

A huge collection of free Wordpress themes for 2013

For Wordpress developers and designers, it is a ever-changing, never-satisfied quench for themes and plugins. Wordpress themes are not exactly hard to come by, but getting the quality right and saving time is a big problem. It is not quite a big proposition to get paid themes at a reasonable cost, but when you are looking for free themes you have to look long and hard. But the kind folks out there have done some research, put together a lot of good posts and are willing to help!

So, we come to designrazzi.com.

A long list of Wordpress free themes are collated in one post. Nothing really new there, but what is new is the interesting mix of themes that are absolutely free of cost, and with acceptable quality. The themes cover the entire range of Wordpress sites from blogs, magazines, websites, corporate sites et. al. I found this invaluable in my search for free themes for a more recent project. I could quickly check how the themes look, take a tour through the demo and narrow down to 4 options for the website. I installed the four chosen themes, checked how my website looks with those themes and selected one. As easy as that!

Free video tutorials for advanced Javascript learning

Love Javascript but don't know where to start? You see too many free lessons but your learning never really took off? Well, the lectures from Douglas Crockford may hold the key!

StudyTonight.com is hosting video lectures from Douglas Crockford, Yahoo!'s JavaScript architect.

The lectures are intended for advanced programmers, or at least those who understand the foundation but appreciate an overview of the past, present, and possible future. Take a look, code away and get learned.

Automate your social posts through IFTTT

We have seen ways to automate sharing your new posts on website through social media/networks here before. But IFTTT beats all that and looks beautiful by doing it.

Social networks are about people. Though I had tried dlvr.it in the past, I tried to keep this manual through something like Hootsuite. This saved me some time, but I was getting highly inefficient at posting everywhere. Again, why care about everywhere? Because of the simple reason that 2-3 websites are still someway to go in building up a credible audience, and until that happens you have to keep the conversation on. I receive very less feedback, and that is received thanks to social media. So it is extremely important for me to maintain conversation on multiple forums, but I was not really good at it. Fast forward to IFTTT.

Aptly named If There Then That (IFTTT), the premise of the platform is simple. Take something that you have done in some part of the web, and deliver it to the other corner without your intervention. Though it is still in beta, for obvious reasons this is gaining a lot of popularity. 

In IFTTT you have 'Ingredients' like Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, etc. and you create 'Recipes' with them. The recipes will take care of listening to what you do in the source (if you get something there), then IFTTT gets that and passes it on. As you might imagine, this goes in a lot of places using automation. The configuration itself is fairly simple, and beautiful looking. You just click on a no. of options to 

• select source (e.g. Facebook, RSS feed of your website, Twitter)
• specify the criteria for selecting posts in the source (e.g. only if posts contain a #technosanct hashtag)
• select destination (e.g. Facebook Page, Facebook, Twitter, Email, GTalk, Buffer) 
• specify what you do in the destination (e.g post a message)

I setup all this today, and strangely don't feel the guilt of not connecting to the people out there. IFTTT is starting the conversation after all, to continue the human (in the form of me) shall get involved!

Find all the popular recipes in IFTTT, or go ahead and create one of your own.