In the mini-flurry of work I’ve been doing on this site recently, I’ve noticed that the loading speed is very slack.  I used the same tools as I use at work (Firebug, YSlow) to analyse the performance issue and have made a number of structural fixes that have made things a bit faster, but it seems to be the initial GET request that is taking the most time.  I’ll talk to DreamHost about it, although given that they’re in the US, it could just be that I need to look at acquiring a CDN.  Obviously I can’t afford it, but I did find an interesting article detailing how to set up Google App Engine, for free, as a personal CDN.  It’s apparently limited to files smaller than 1MB, 650,000 requests per day and 10GB of downloads – but that’s perfectly fine for 99.9% of the things that this site serves.

On a side-note, I’ve switched to a better browser detection script as the old one had serious issues with IE8.  I know that browser-sniffing is not a good thing, but it seems to work fine for now (and it’s only really for IE6/7 – everything else gets pretty much the same standards-based HTML/CSS/JS), at least until I sort out some kind of feature detection routine.

And on a completely different side-note, using this page I finally fixed the annoying console error messages that plague Firefox with Firebug and HTML Validator extensions installed.  Hurrah!

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