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I finished my first week teaching CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford. It went well. The class is settling in at 35 students plus another 10 watching remotely through the Stanford Center for Professional Development. It’s 2/3 undergrad, 1/3 grad. The students are smart and ask great questions.

It’s important to make resources (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) cacheable so your pages load faster when users come back. A recent study from Website Optimization shows that the top 1000 home pages average over 50 resources per page! Being able to skip 50 HTTP requests and just read those resources from the browser’s cache dramatically speeds up pages.

I was in Portland for OSCON last week. There were many talks that attracted my attention - so many that I couldn’t get to them all. If you missed some talks, or didn’t make it to OSCON, check out this great effort capturing Oscon in 37 minutes. Gregg Pollack asked 45 speakers to summarize their talk in 30 seconds.

In my first book, High Performance Web Sites, I presented 14 rules for making web pages faster. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Bad news first: there are more than 14 things you have to do to speed up your pages. The good news is I’ve started another book that describes more best practices for web performance.