Author Archives: Will Alexander

About Will Alexander

With over a decade of experience in online publishing, implementing and managing solutions for publishers, solution providers and advertisers, Will possess unparalleled technical and engineering skills. Will has deep expertise in performance engineering and web optimization through implementing and supporting highly-available, high-capacity systems and applications and integrating those systems within existing infrastructure. Solutions delivered under his guidance and leadership are capable of delivering perceived performance improvements in excess of 50%, while also giving greater control to the delivery of page elements.

Component Level Real-User Monitoring

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Will Alexander

GhostWriter lets you prioritize when and how you load third-party content, like ads.  Your users see what they’re looking for sooner which increases engagement and improves your search engine rankings. One of the ways it does this is by introducing … Continue reading →

Posted in network monitoring | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Got ad performance problems? Find out!

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Will Alexander

We saw that Google Analytics now supported Page Load Time metrics out-of-the-box and started thinking about how we might be able to use GhostWriter’s insights into third-party content (read: ads) performance to give users of both GhostWriter and Google Analytics … Continue reading →

Posted in ScriptLoading, javascript, webperf | 1 Comment

Auto Semi-Colon Insertion and Closures

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Will Alexander

I was working on a Javascript library, applying what I thought was an innocuous change to remove an unnecessary closure. The original code looked like this. Foo= (function(){ return function($){alert($)} })() (function(){ /* … */ })(); I re-factored to remove … Continue reading →

Posted in javascript | Comments Off

Gecko and WebKit To Iframes: “Freeze! Or you’ll reload!”

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Will Alexander

iFrames aren’t evil, just misguided I’ve always looked at iframes with a great deal of skepticism. They seem like something of an intruder, delivered from their own domain and free to embed whatever content they see fit. Browsers implement a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Internet Explorer’s Native Support for Script Pre-Fetching

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Will Alexander

Script pre-fetching is a very useful technique allowing you to defer execution of a script or serialize execution of multiple scripts which have dependencies. Existing implementations rely on various hacks to achieve pre-fetching, all of which require the resource be cache-able. This post shows how Internet Explorer has native support for this concept and provides code that can be used so hacks are limited to other browsers. Continue reading →

Posted in ScriptLoading, webperf | Tagged , , | Leave a comment