Alex Schultz: APIs

Making a little effort on improving my cocktailmaking.co.uk facebook integration

A little bit of time investment can really pay dividends. Up until last weekend my cocktail site has been running off of the old php connect sdk. One of my little projects for Christmas was to see if I could migrate everything to the new Facebook Platform. It was shockingly easy to get everything done. The Facebook Javascript SDK is really easy to use and there is a great example of how to get the data back and forth from Facebook.

I work for Facebook but am no means a developer or working on the platform team. It’s just great to see how big a change the platform improvements from earlier this year have made to my integration (now I finally found time to implement them).

Big impact from reducing page weight and load times

Another holiday project for me was to work on reducing the load time for my pages. There were a few reasons for this:

1. I was using bandwidth like it was going out of fashion and finally was about to violate my (very generous) limits
2. My pages were taking a ridiculous time to load and it was just embarrassing
3. Google have very publically been stating that page speed is important for ranking (and the whole web has focussed on this in 2010)

As such I used my webalizer log file analytics package to pull out the highest bandwidth files and I isolated that the moo tools js (I was using for some super simple text animation) and a promotion banner were using 40% of the bandwidth. Although this is stating the obvious usually 90% of the actual impact of the problem you are dealing with is driven by 10% of the problems. Webalizer is a great way (on bandwidth usage) of homing in on the causes. I did about 2hrs of work to hack everything around and reduced my bandwidth usage by 25%. The surprise for me was that I saw an immediate impact on my data:

All year my pages per visitor has been down substantially. Users were getting bored and leaving the site faster. Reducing the page weight by 40% increased my page views per visitor by 25%. What was really interesting about this is that it stood out in all my data. For example even though I should have cut total bandwidth usage by 40% it only went down 25% since the number of pages being downloaded from the site spiked substantially. This was awesome to see :)