Whether you are a techy or not, we ALL use the internet, so I think it behooves us all to become a little more conversant with its nuts and bolts. To that end, in no particular order, I give you Some Stuff I Learned This Week:
- Asynchronous Loading – instead of loading consecutively, scripts for a page can load simultaneously. How handy! There can be some user experience drawbacks (the dreaded page “flicker) but overall it helps your site to load faster rather than each script waiting in line for the one before it to finish.
- All sites on wordpress.com are just millions and millions of sites on one giant multi-site install. Mind. Blown. If you really think about it, it makes perfect sense, with all those subdomains (yoursite.wordpress.com). But I was still the girl at the Philadelphia WordPress meetup who was astonished by this simple fact. I can’t wait to go back and see what they teach me next!
- Improve site load time by including the forward slash. (bonus – remember which is which by thinking forward slash leans forwards and backward slash leans backwards. A, um…friend of mine has to use that trick to remember. Not me. Ahem.) So sometimes I would see a url with a forward slash on the end and wonder why precisely. Turns out, by including a forward slash on the end of the site’s address, you are directing the server to go to a directory, not a specific file. When it gets to the directory, it will look for the default file (usually whatever you have designated as the home or landing page). But if you direct the web server to the file, there can be a problem if there are two files with that name (not that common, but it can happen) and it also takes a little bit longer to get to a file than to the directory. So use that forward slash!
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