I am proud to announce the birth of our son, Jackson Johar Taiabjee, on Oct 18, 2007.

Both Jack and mom are doing great! You can find pics and more on Jack’s blog at http://jack.taiabjee.com

The quickest and easiest way to speed up your website is to add mod_gzip to your pages. Basically what it does is takes any .html page on the server, and uses gzip compression to shrink the file before sending it out. IE or Firefox at the users end will unzip it and display it automatically, so the process is completely transparent to the end user.

For example, right now, the joetek.ca homepage is about 40K, but because I have gzipped it, the page is crunched down to about 8K before sending it to your browser. It uses a little bit of processor power on the server, and a little bit on your browser, but the file is 1/5 the size for transferring across the Internet, through your connection at home and onto your computer. This can create a drastic overall performance increase.

Most hosts are already configured to gzip .html, or .php pages and a few others. You can see if your host uses compression with the mod_gzip test. Images shouldn’t be compressed, because .gif’s and .jpg’s are already compressed, and re-compressing them can actually make the file larger.

The biggest overlooked files though are CSS files. In many sites, it is easy for these files to grow to 100k and more, which could compress down to 15k or less. They usually aren’t compressed by default, and sometimes you don’t have access to enable it. Here’s a quick two line solution.

Let’s say your .css file is /css/style.css. Your server will not compress this, simply because the file has a .css extension. You don’t want to just rename it, because that will cause problems when you load it back up in your editor if you want to make changes.

First, create a new file in your /css/ directory called style.php with these contents:

All you have to do now, is change your header so that instead of loading your old style.css, it loads style.php. Find and replace a line that looks like this:

with this:

Enjoy!

Hi Folks,

Over the past few weeks we have been in the process of moving the system to a new offsite location to address the reliability issues. Suddenly, that process has been put into high gear. Lots of issues with the Joetek Server this morning. Read the rest of this entry »

The Interactive Friend Thing allows you to visualize your friend list in a way that groups together people that are friends of each other. It naturally sorts itself into groups that you worked with, or went to school with, etc.

Just a neat way of looking at your friends! Just double-click any of them to see who they are attached to!

A new feature was added to Google Maps last week that allows you to zoom right in to view what the street looks like in the major cities. Already, Top Sightings sites have popped up showing off some of the interesting things captured as the Street View Car zoomed by.

Very cool, as Google once again raises the bar for its mapping competition. Try it out!

Today, my latest project launched! Take a peek at Green Living Online, the new site for Green Living Magazine which promotes healthy lifestyles that are good for you, your family and the environment. Our partnership with the Yahoo Lifestyle Section launches in a few weeks.

“Green Living Enterprises promotes sustainable and healthy living in a hip, upbeat and informative manner. We are committed to raising public awareness of the ecological issues, innovations and solutions facing us today.”

It’s been a busy few months in development, and putting together the tools of the site! Hope you enjoy it!

So I eventually got a Joost token to try out the newest product from the folks that brought you Kazaa and Skype. It’s a great concept. It is basically a cross between a p2p network and a television.

So you want to watch a show, you just select what you want to watch and it plays.
In the background, it has found some other people that are watching (or have watched) the same show and starts downloading from them to speed up the transfer. What a great idea!

Except… well, there’s always an exception, isn’t there?

They need some real content. The most popular shows on the Joost network are Surfing Competitions, Bridezillas and Car Reviews. The video quality is great, and some of the content is okay, but certainly nothing to get excited about. After about 30 minutes of watching these 5-10 minute videos, I’d seen what I wanted to see (that is, the technology) and I was out of there. There was no content that could grab me.

And so, we return to the world where content is king, and good content will always win out. Even some of the crap on Youtube draws you in more than a 20 year old clip of surfers hitting a wave.

Now, it’s still in beta, so we’ll see if they can ink some real content deals. Put the real, prime-time stuff on the Joost network, and I’d gladly redirect the cash I send to the cable company to them, but not as it is!

By the way, I do have some Joost Invites available. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to give it a try!

See when the Shuttle is flying over you! Using real-time tracking and Google Maps, track the live location of the Space Shuttle now in flight! It uses AJAX for real-time updates and even shows your location on the map based on your IP address!

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Welcome to the new-look Joetek website!

In addition to cutting over from Movable Type to Wordpress as the engine, this new site allows individual-post permalinks, category and monthly archives, and the return of comments!

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Steve Pavlina is running an experiment on Polyphasic Sleep. Okay, this is really cool. He has shifted his sleeping patterns to sleep 6 half-hour naps a day, instead of one 8 hour sleep. How would you survive with 3 hours of sleep per day, every day?

Basically, he has trained himself to fall into REM sleep almost immediately, so that those 3 hours are quality sleep. Well, he’s been going for 3 weeks now, and he hasn’t gone insane yet! Let’s see what happens!