Oreilly Media News & Articles

One of the announcements at the Open Source Business Conference happening now in San Francisco, California, is that of the "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source."Let's take a stroll through the who's who of open source MVPs.

O’Reilly Media’s got another book for you.

As you probably know, performance plays a critical part in a website’s journey to success. This doesn’t bode well for sites that are bogged down in Web applications that push browsers to the brink with heavy doses of rich content and Ajax.

In Even Faster Web Sites, author Steve Souders, Web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides techniques and advice for improving your site’s performance under three different categories:

• JavaScript-Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.
• Network-Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.
• Browser-Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Even Faster Web Sites also contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas. Pick up your own copy here and get on your way to faster load and response times.

Still searching for that perfect Christmas gift for the web designer on your list? Not anymore.

O'Reilly has just published Universal Design for Web Applications, a new book that promotes designing accessible websites and teaches readers how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business.

It’s safe to say, that many publishers don’t know exactly what going digital entails. O’Reilly comes to the rescue by offering a free Webcast on Wednesday, November 12, at 1 p.m. EDT about What Publishers Need to Know About Digitization.

The Webcast will last approximately 90 minutes. You can register here.

Consultant and software engineer for the publishing industry, Liza Daly, will lead the Webcast. As an independent consultant and the founder of Threepress, developer of the Bookworm EPUB e-reading application, blogger for several publishing and technology blogs, and a member of the advisory boards for the Web 2.0 Expo NYC 2008 and O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) 2009 conferences, Daly will aim to offer guidance and support for those in the industry struggling to go digital.

The Webcast assumes no prior experience with digitization, as Daly presents a “friendly and accessible overview of the conversion process”. The Webcast will cover the following topics:

• What’s XML and do you need it?
• What’s the cost-benefit analysis versus PDF or other formats?
• What to look for in selecting a vendor and how to watch out for hidden costs.

In addition, the Webcast will tackle issues of control and lock-in versus cost savings, partnering with Google, Amazon, or a centralized platform, or going on your own — among many other topics.

The Webcast is a component of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change (TOC) for Publishing division, which seeks to connect the people, companies and organizations asking and answering the questions that will define the future of publishing.

We recently told you about the upcoming goings on at UX Week 2008 in San Francisco in August. But there’s more to UX Week 2008 than just the user experience. The Subject to Change book fiesta, for example.

On Wednesday, August 13 from 6:30 - 9:30 PM (PST), the authors of Subject to Change (O’Reilly Media) offer registrants an opportunity to learn more about this innovative book, as well as to “dig deeper into the emerging field of experience strategy and design and meet some of the best in the industry”.