Tag Archives: perfmatters

Automating WebPageTest using the nodejs webpagetest-api package

WebPageTest-api NodeJS

Hopefully you’ve already had a chance to play around with the amazing WebPageTest during your website performance testing adventure so far.

In case not, I have a few articles you might like to browse, to help you get up to speed using this fantastic, free, open source, website performance testing tool.

It has a website interface and also an API, which I went through in the previous article.

In this article I’ll show you how to use the incredible webpagetest-api nodejs package to make the orchestration and automation of your WebPageTest setup even easier!

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Image Placeholders: Do it right or don’t do it at all. Please.

Hello. I’m a grumpy old web dev. I’m still wasting valuable memory on things like the deprecated img element’s lowsrc attribute (bring it back!), the hacks needed to get a website looking acceptable in both Firefox 2.5 and IE5.5 and IE on Mac, and what “cards” and “decks” meant in WAP terminology.

Having this – possibly pointless – information to hand means I am constantly getting frustrated at supposed “breakthrough” approaches to web development and optimisation which seem to be adding complexity for the sake of it, sometimes apparently ignoring existing tech.

What’s more annoying is when a good approach to something is implemented so badly that it reflects poorly on the original concept. I’ve previously written about how abusing something clever like React results in an awful user experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love new tech, new approaches, new thinking, new opinions. I’m just sometimes grumpy about it because these new things don’t suit my personal preferences. Hence this article! Wahey!

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The Tesco Mobile Website and The Importance of Device Testing

A constant passion of mine is efficiency: not being wasteful, repeating something until the process has been refined to the most effective, efficient, economical, form of the activity that is realistically achievable.

I’m not saying I always get it right, just that it’s frustrating when I see this not being done. Especially so when the opposite seems to be true, as if people are actively trying to make things as bad as possible.

Which brings me on the the current Tesco mobile website, the subject of this article, and of my dislike of the misuse of a particular form of web technology: client side rendering.

What follows is a mixture of web perf analysis and my own opinions and preferences. And you know what they say about opinions…

Client Side Rendering; What is it good for?

client side rendering frameworks

No, it’s not “absolutely nothing”! Angular, React, Vue; they all have their uses. They do a job, and in the most part they do it well.

The problem comes when developers treat every problem like something that can be solved with client side rendering.

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