Comments on: Reducing HTTP Requests: An idea for a plugin

By: Khalil

Khalil — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:56:14 +0000

Hello,
Just wondering if anyone could help. I did something stupid and started my blog using a numerical archive system, and now I'd like to change it so that the post title is part of the URL for SEO reasons. Is there any Wordpress plugins that anyone knows of that could switch it without sending Googlers to invalid pages? Maybe some sort of redirector to the correct page?

Thanks.

By: scott becker

scott becker — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 17:02:22 +0000

By the way, the Rails plugin has been updated and has some nice new features (stylesheet support, per asset timestamps, etc).

The name also changed from MergeJS to AssetPackager.

http://synthesis.sbecker.net/pages/asset_packager

By: scottbecker

scottbecker — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 21:17:58 +0000

After reading Cal Henderson’s article on Vitamin Serving Javascript Fast I was immediately inspired to create a plugin to easily facilitate this in Ruby on Rails. I whipped up most of it right then.

Seeing your article and Chris Williams blog post kicked it into high gear, and I finally got around to polishing it for release today.

Told myself I wasn’t allowed to eat today until I finished. How’s that for inspiration?

Here you go!

MergeJS: http://synthesis.sbecker.net/pages/merge_js

- Scott

By: HR

HR — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:44:23 +0000

I’m sorry, my previous post came out so wrong. After re-reading it I realize it sounds angry and it really wasn’t my intention ;) The article’s good and the idea is sound, I just wanted to point out to other readers that defining revalidation headers is good practice. Sorry again, next time I will post _after_ a good night of sleep, not before.

BTW, thanks for the link to Mark Nottingham’s blog, this is a must read.

By: timlucas

timlucas — Tue, 30 May 2006 13:02:18 +0000

HR: I really didn’t cover the whole HTTP expiration side of things as I was mainly trying to discuss the idea of mashing assets together at deployment time–but you’re right; you do definitely want to control the expires and max-age to take advantage of this kind of setup. If this plugin was ever to come to fruition I’d hope that Apache and lighttpd code snippets would accompany it.

In terms of page caching, you’re right in that if the HTML never changes then browsers won’t re-request the asset. You either have to expire page caches or stay dynamic.

By: HR

HR — Tue, 30 May 2006 12:44:00 +0000

Query string or not, you should always set the corresponding headers if you’re serving a file that can be cached. Especially in this case, where you should set a “Expires” header to a very distant date and/or a “Cache-control” with a huge “max-age” to avoid unnecessary revalidations.

BTW, I don’t know RoR, but doesn’t this technique interfere with the page cache? if the CSS file changes, shouldn’t all the cached files referring to it be invalidated?

By: timlucas

timlucas — Tue, 30 May 2006 06:26:50 +0000

Eric.Coleman: I haven’t tested them, but according to Mike D and Cal’s comments there shouldn’t be a problem.

By: timlucas

timlucas — Tue, 30 May 2006 06:22:51 +0000

BerislavLopac: Not sure exactly what you mean. Forcing new assets to download via a URL change means that you can serve them with expiry dates far into the future, allowing browsers to use their cache without any HTTP chatter.

By: Eric.Coleman

Eric.Coleman — Tue, 30 May 2006 06:22:51 +0000

I was under the impression that IE & firefox would both cache urls with query strings. It’s safari & opera that will not.

Am I wrong in this assumption?

By: timlucas

timlucas — Tue, 30 May 2006 06:18:57 +0000

Cal: Yep, but that’s really only a prob if you’re serving them from something other than Apache, lighttpd etc. A comment on Cal’s article (different Cal?) has more information: The State of Browser Caching.