I know I do

Yesterday afternoon, Yahoo! released a nice little tool built on top of Firebug called YSlow (Firefox only). In Yahoo!’s own words:

YSlow measures web page performance based on the best practices evangelized by Yahoo!‘s Exceptional Performance team. Since many of these best practices focus on the frontend, YSlow is integrated with Joe Hewitt’s Firebug, the web development tool of choice for frontend developers. »

I test drove the tool this morning and apart from the fact that I got an embarrassing and pitiful F for Youtilize, I still really like YSlow.

YSlow follows YDN’s Exceptional Performance guide for its performance test, which is definitely a great guide to follow. One thing to keep in mind though is that one solution doesn’t fit all, so don’t take the test results too closely to heart.

For example, while I agree I need to minimize my HTTP requests, I don’t think this blog will benefit greatly from using a Content Delivery Network. Other blogs may, but not me. At least not yet

Summary

Use this tool to see if there’s anything you can do to optimize your website, but don’t go crazy over every negative result.

Also, YSlow is a plugin for a Firefox plugin? Weird.

Not sure which CSS selectors you still need and which ones you can throw away? Obsessed about site optimization?

Introducing the CSS Redundancy Checker

Built by Mike Malone, this awesome tool will first scan your CSS file and take note of all the selectors.

Next, it will scan your site and see which selectors are used and which aren’t, thus easily tracking down those elusive CSS rules that you aren’t using anymore.

This is particularly helpful when finishing big projects. Personally, my stylesheets go through much reiteration before finally going live. This tool will help me roll out clean and optimized CSS. And as we all know, optimization is key on production of any scale.

Without further ado, I present you the CSS Redundancy Checker.

Source — Check out Mike’s thoughts and upcoming improvements.

Left Logic’s HTML Entity Character Lookup tool is excitingly helpful for any web developer.

Some codes like & and © are known by heart, but most are just too much to remember. This is where this site comes in. This simple tool will easily find the HTML code you’re looking for.

Dashboard widget

To top it all off, if you’re a Mac user, you’re in luck. You can pick up their small Widget (scroll down to d/l) and reap the same benefits straight from your Dashboard.

Via Wikkid Apps