My team of Web Speeders developed an awesome application of Google Documents and Google Page Speed API that shows the power of Web based spreadsheets and API-based performance analysis.

We called the app SpeedSheet – it works as follows:

1. you collect page URLs from the users using a regular Google Spreadsheet form:
2. these URLs end up in the spreadsheet powered by Google Docs
3. this spreadsheet has some code in JavaScript (App Script) that is executed using form submit trigger every time new URL is entered into a form
4. this code makes a call to Google Page Speed API and retrieves overall score inserting it back into a spreadsheet next to a URL entered
5. then to make it visually appealing, Google Charts API is used to draw a Google-o-meter for a score

You can see result in a spreadsheet:

Team Web Speeders worked hard, we wrote the whole thing at the hackathon and got 3rd place in “new applications” category – Zombie Survival Guide (if you ask me, author is crazy and not just a comedian).

I’d like to thank people who joined the team and coded away with me:

• Ivete Tecedor (@ivetetecedor)
• Kirill
• Abelardo Medenilla (@eltiburongrande)
• and Tarik Bolat

Thanks to the team for daring!

We have 9 meetups all over the world already:

(and if you started one, but I don’t know about it, let me know)

We have almost 3200 members together and ran over 100 sessions!

But I think it’s not over and only the beginning so what I want to do is to ask you to write about your experience at the meetup you went to recently and what you want to do as a result, e.g. fix your corporate web site, optimize your blog, learn how the hell browsers / servers / network / JavaScript works and so on!

I’m especially proud of European groups that started recently, but kick ass nontheless!
Our favorite O’Reilly Velocity conference is coming to Berlin next month so we partnered with them and going to raffle off one FREE CONFERENCE PASS for Velocity Berlin.

All you need to get the pass is Tweet about your blog post, or if you didn’t write a blog post, then just tweet how awesome your meetup was and use #awesome @webperf to tag your tweet so we can find it!

The last tweets accepted for raffle will be the ones sent by the end of the day on Friday, October 21st when we will close the “submissions” and raffle the pass, but you should keep raving about you meetup.

And I’ll see you at the meetup!

This was pretty annoying for many people so I’m pushing this minor release (1.1.1) to fix it.

Just follow upgrade instructions if you already have an instance running:
http://www.showslow.org/Upgrading_existing_instance

Or you can download code package:
https://github.com/sergeychernyshev/showslow/downloads

and install it:
http://www.showslow.org/Installation_and_configuration

Let me know if you’ll have troubles upgrading and don’t forget to submit bugs and suggestions to the issue tracker:
https://github.com/sergeychernyshev/showslow/issues

And join the discussion mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/showslow

Download it now!

We worked hard to add more beacons, more features and just did a redesign!

To outline major new things that were building up to the 1.0 release:

• Checkboxes to graph any metric that is being tracked so you can pick and choose!
  
• Support for Flot, new charting library that does better job at visualizing the data and allowed us to add more interactivity (thanks, Kai)
  
• Support for automation using Google Page Speed API (thanks, Bryan)
• Quick WebPageTest run with remembering the test history and visual comparison for recorded tests (Pat, thanks for the API)
  
• New design with better colors and style (thanks, Corey)
• and many more minor changes and bugfixes

And as before, Show Slow supports, YSlow, Page Speed (both, extension and now API) and dynaTrace AJAX beacons as well as HAR beacon, custom metric beacons (for all your custom data) and last, but not least, event records to annotate the timeline with information about code releases, configuration changes and so on so you can make most sense of your web performance information.

That being said, it’s very easy to add more tools to the mix – if you have a tool that can provide useful data for web performance tracking, it is a good candidate for inclusion into Show Slow. If you have questions, just ask them on the mailing list or just go and contribute your changes!

A few months ago we also moved to Git and are hosted on Github now. This means that it became much easier for members of our community to supply patches and I’d like to thank them all for doing so and invite you all to go and fork the project – it’s easy to make your changes without the fear of breaking stuff and even easier to participate in open source community around Show Slow!

Our project would not be possible without ShowSlow.com, the public demo instance and I’d like to thank everyone who’s helping out with it: Aaron Kulick for running YSlow and Page Speed testing farm, Alois Reitbauer and Andreas Grabner from dynaTrace AJAX team for running their test farm and Blaze.io for sponsoring some of the development for the project.

Don’t forget to grab your schwag:

And I hope to see many of you at Velocity next week and will be happy to answer any questions about Show Slow!

I was given a chance to work on it before it was released to general public and was very happy to get such a tool as it make it the easiest option when it come to setting up ShowSlow instance with automated testing.

Basically, all you need to do is to call a beacon URL when you need to run Page Speed test and store results in ShowSlow. Data is stored in the same tables as browser extension beacon data and works pretty smoothly.

Configuration is pretty easy, check out documentation on the wiki or just open /beacons/pagespeed/ on your instance for auto-documentation.

I hope to add UI for it and integrate it with URL adding interface in a near future.

Here’s a full list of things released in ShowSlow 0.18:

• Google Page Speed Online API support
• WebPageTest visual comparison can now be done right from details page (№21)
• Custom metrics (№18) and cross-hair numbers in Flot charts (№16)
• DB port configuration option by Russell Davis (№25)
• crc32 PHP replacement by Russell Davis (№24)
• Fix for null values in data2.php
• Page Speed values are optional now (n/a instead of zeros)
• Indexes on url_id in metric tables for better performance

Follow upgrade instructions if you already have an instance running:
http://www.showslow.org/Upgrading_existing_instance

Download the code package:
https://github.com/sergeychernyshev/showslow/downloads

and install it:
http://www.showslow.org/Installation_and_configuration

Let me know if you’ll have troubles upgrading and don’t forget to create issues and vote for bugs in the issue tracker:
https://github.com/sergeychernyshev/showslow/issues

And please introduce yourself on our mailing list and feel free to ask questions:
http://groups.google.com/group/showslow

Enjoy!

It’s going to be a good tool walk-through from the creators of the tools and I’ll talk about setting up your own instance of Show Slow to collect the metrics over time and how it can be used as a dashboard for your performance optimization initiative.

I’ll  talk about the latest features that became available and describe what you can quickly start with and get the most benefit in a short time.

• dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.0
• WebPageTest (with new ATF and tcptraffic levels and more)
• Mobile bookmarklets collection
• and more …

RSVP Now on Meetup.com

We’re at Meetup HQ again – their fridge is full of drinks and tables are full of pizza! Thank them for hosting when you come!

Agenda:

6:30 – Arrive to Meetup HQ, meet other members
6:45 – Event starts
7:00 – Web Performance Optimization Tools
8:00 – Q&A
8:15 – Book giveaway
8:30 – Open Discussion, Networking

Location:

Meetup HQ
632 Broadway
Floor 3
NY, NY 10012

Directions on Google Maps: http://bit.ly/eQVxqp
Entrance on StreetView: http://bit.ly/gd4fgk

Sponsors:
Catchpoint is sponsoring us by providing 10% discount to our members and also books for our books section.

O’Reilly also provides discount to members for the books and sent some books to give away as well.

ReSell.biz makes it easy to become a domain ReSeller! Become a domain reseller and benefit from always low bulk domain prices, zero fees and zero commitments.

RSVP now on Meetup.com

Guy Podjarny will talk about the state of mobile web performance, based on the data gathered using blaze.io mobile testing tool.

Guy Podjarny, CTO at Blaze
Guy spent the last decade prior to Blaze as a Software Architect and Web Application Security expert, driving the IBM Rational AppScan product line from inception to being the leading Web Application Security assessment tool. Guy has filed over 15 patents, presented at numerous conferences, and has published several professional papers.

Agenda:

6:30 – Arrive to Meetup HQ, meet other members
6:45 – Event starts
7:00 – State of mobile web performance (Guy Podjarny)
8:00 – Q&A
8:15 – Book giveaway
8:30 – Open Discussion, Networking

Meetup.com is hosting us again. And they still have food and beer!

Location:
Meetup HQ
632 Broadway
3rd floor
New York, NY 10012

Directions on Google Maps: http://bit.ly/f8jfwE
Entrance on StreetView: http://bit.ly/i0L2CH

Sponsors:
Catchpoint is sponsoring us by providing 10% discount to our members and also books for our books section.

O’Reilly also provides discount to members for the books and sent some books to give away as well.

ReSell.biz is the complete domain name reseller and hosting reseller solution.

At some point in discussion about casual gaming I remembered great series of projects by Luis von Ahn (of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA fame) who was working on so called “human computation”.

One of the ideas he was working on was development of games that humans can play and produce a side product that will help computers with tasks that they are not that good at. He created ESP game that was later licensed to Google to become Google Image Labeler and Peekaboom (now unavailable).

These two games were working on a problem of object identification in images – task that computers might never be able to master, at least during our lifetime. I really recommend his awesome presentation about the topic of human computation, CAPTCHAs and games – watch it all, it’s worth it.

So, talking to Drit about the performance, I realized that human computation can be the answer to one of the problems that Web Performance field is struggling with for a while already: how to automatically identify “enough” point of the web page, when it becomes reasonable for a user to engage with the page; metric that we can use to optimize web page performance for.

This metric is notoriously hard to measure, browser events only reveal technical aspect of page load, but do not tell much about user’s perception. Even render events are not good enough as having something drawn on the page, although dramatically removes the emptiness feeling of “nothing is happening”, still doesn’t provide the enough moment.

There are some algorithms that try to define “enough” by analyzing the drawing activity of the visible area of the page (so called “above the fold”, term we got from newspapers), they are still not very precise and hit the same constraints any object recognition algorithm will hit.

And having this problem in my head for quite a while, looking for an ideal metric that Show Slow can track, that can be put on weekly reports and even t-shirts, I realized that we might not be able to give a good answer to this problem by computerized means. It is very possible that the only way to achieve reasonable results is to use human brains.

So the solution could look like a game or at least a game-like environment in which people are given a simple task that, as a side product can produce enough data so we can identify performance metrics using statistical analysis.

Right now I see a few important metrics that people can enter voluntarily on involuntarily – time at which page rendered to “enough” state and points on the screen that represent the most important visual information.

Both of these metrics can probably be collected simultaneously and using the same process. Players might be identifying page’s content or provide timing directly.

Luckily many tools, including free and open source WebPageTest.org and Catchpoint’s commercial monitor can already capture images of page rendering activity so getting the content is not a problem.

So, what it all means is that people can work very well where computers can’t and human computation can come to rescue for web performance industry’s most complex problems.

RSVP now: http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-NY/events/16508657/

Justin Cataldo (@jcataldo), Lead UI Engineer at Meetup will talk about performance of Meetup.com including some improvements done to #NewMeetup.

Agenda:

6:30 – Arrive to Meetup HQ, meet other members
6:45 – Event starts
7:00 – #NewMeetup performance (Justin Cataldo)
8:00 – Q&A
8:15 – Book giveaway
8:30 – Open Discussion, Networking

Location:
Meetup.com is hosting us again. And they still have food and beer!

Meetup HQ
632 Broadway
3rd floor
New York, NY 10012

Directions on Google Maps: http://bit.ly/hgBLAn
Entrance on StreetView: http://bit.ly/gVfFIp

Sponsors:
Catchpoint is sponsoring us by providing 10% discount to our members and also books for our books section.

O’Reilly also provides discount to members for the books and sent some books to give away as well.

ReSell.biz is the complete domain name reseller and hosting reseller solution.