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Archive for March, 2008

YSlow ApnaBill.com ?

March 22nd, 2008

We just finished porting ApnaBill.com from Rails 1.2.5 to Rails 2.0.2 - the port wasn’t that tough, specially with Ben’s Rails2 Upgrade Notes on SlashDotDash.

The steps we took…

Make your config file reflect the new rails version (make sure you have it installed)
Move all instances of start_form_tag to form_tag
Change find_all to find(:all)… this wasn’t an issue with us
Take care of @session stuff - Rails2 uses session and header instead of @session and @header

With Rails2, comes the caching options for your assets - mainly JS and CSS assets. Checkout changeset 6164 for more details - but somehow combining all css/js into single files at runtime was taking more time than loading them separately in succession. Hence I switched back to asset_packager plugin by Scott Becker - and boy, it works like a charm! It churns out a combined (white-spaces removed) combined css and js files in production mode, while keeping them separately in development mode.

JS and CSS in development mode.

JS and CSS in production code

And thanks to YSlow, I managed to squeeze a bit more of speed into rendering of the page by moving JS content to as low in the HTML content as possible. As explained by YSlow, CSS should be kept at the top of your HTML while JS as low as possible - reason being - only CSS (most of the times) is required to render the page correctly. So why waste time fetching JS content when it’ll not be needed till the page is fully rendered…

Manage to pimp ApnaBill.com’s YSlow performance grade to D (65) from below 45

Next in queue is how to manage GZip headers in the HTTP requests from ApnaBill.com

Posted in ApnaBill, Rails | Comments (0)

Giving ApnaBill a 76.35% kick :)

March 14th, 2008

If Rails was not cool enough, caching is icing on the cake

Check this out - pulled right from the production log…

Without Caching
Completed in 0.02199 (45 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.02001 (90%) | DB: 0.00106 (4%) | 200 OK

With Caching
Completed in 0.00520 (192 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.00430 (82%) | DB: 0.00086 (16%) | 200 OK

% Kick
((0.02199 - 0.00520)*100)/0.02199 == 76.35%

Thats a whopping 76% speed increase in rendering the ApnaBill.com front page

Tools: content_cache plugin from Coda Hale. Check out other plugins he wrote…

Articles: RoR caching tutorial - Part1 and Part2 from Rails Envy guys…

Posted in ApnaBill, Rails | Comments (2)

Designing a logo for ApnaBill.com - weekend stuff!

March 1st, 2008

I “might” be good at many things - but when it comes to designing with a mouse, I’m absolutely pathetic! One major reason for this being I lack the patience to sit in front of the PC and keep iterating over - and over again - on the same image - design and modifying it each time till that wow thing happens! Top that up with my (almost) color blindness to any other color than RGB - and you can understand how my designing skills might be

Anyways, this week, I was seriously trying to break that jinx. Reading a ton of Photoshop tutorials (Smashing Magazine has a pretty nice collection!) and trying whatever I could.

This was not a sudden liking - but rather a revelation.

Of all the parts that form the web development process, designing is a major part of them. If your stuff is not visually appealing, all the logic behind it would never go mainstream because your users would never come in the numbers you expected. WYSIWYG works most of the time! - specially when you are forming those first impressions…

Also, over the time, I had started to realize that I’m being dependent on others for each and every graphic design related task. Even a small change & I had to bug my friends to help me out.

So thought - lets change all that. Lets learn some Photoshop over the weekend!

These are a few designs I made for ApnaBill.com - our Beta Launch!