Webmasters Gallery

Recently, I have been doing research on Web Caching. And I have found Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters , which is a detailed, informational document published by Mark Nottingham.

A Web cache sits between one or more Web servers and a client or many clients, and watches requests come by, saving copies of the responses — like HTML pages, images and files — for itself. Then, if there is another request for the same URL, it can use the response that it has, instead of asking the origin server for it again.

Web Caching can reduce latency, because the request is satisfied from the cache instead of the origin server, it takes less time for it to get the representation and display it. This makes the Web seem more responsive.

And also, Web Caching can reduce network traffic, because representations are reused, it reduces the amount of bandwidth used by a client. This saves money if the client is paying for traffic, and keeps their bandwidth requirements lower and more manageable.

You can also get more information about the type of web caches, how web caches work, how to control them, tips for building a cache-aware site and etc…

Dragon Labs is featuring 3 beautiful CSS / JavaScript effects that you may want to use in your websites. Here they are:

Codename Rainbows

A solution to create rainbow effects by not using any images.

It is accomplished with the help of some JavaScript and CSS magic to apply a two-color gradient to any text. Shadows and highlights can also be applied.

Codename Putterfish

This is a CSS trick, specially used in menus, that fades any other elements when one of the items is hovered.

Codename DragonFish

It is technique to smoothly change colors and create ambient motion. A nice demo is presented here.

P.S. Rainbow & Putterfish are well-described & source files are offered. On the other hand, DragonFish, currently, only comes with the demo.