Tags: house

I’m a little obsessed with web performance. I like being able to check a page’s core web vitals quickly and easily.

Four years ago, I made a Lighthouse bookmarklet. Whatever web page you were on, when you clicked on the bookmarklet you’d get the Lighthouse results for that page. Handy!

It doesn’t work anymore. This is probably because Google are in the loop. Four years is pretty good innings for anything involving that company.

I kid (mostly). Lighthouse itself is still going strong, despite being a Google product. But the bookmarklet needs updating.

Rather than just get Lighthouse results, I figured that the full PageSpeed Insights results would be even better. If your website is in the Chrome UX report, you get to see those CrUX details too.

So here’s the updated bookmarklet:

PageSpeed Insights

Drag that up to your desktop browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Press it whenever you want to test the page you’re on.

My Challenge to the Web Performance Community — Philip Walton

I’ve noticed a trend in recent years—a trend that I’ve admittedly been part of myself—where performance-minded developers will rebuild a site and then post a screenshot of their Lighthouse score on social media to show off how fast it is.

Mea culpa! I should post my CrUX reports too.

But I’m going to respectfully decline Phil’s advice to use any of the RUM analytics providers he recommends that require me to put another script element on my site. One third-party script is one third-party script too many.

Global performance insights for your site | Lighthouse Metrics

I hadn’t come across this before—run Lighthouse tests on your pages from six different locations around the world at once.

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.

I use Firefox. You should too. It’s fast, secure, and more privacy-focused than the leading browser from the big G.

When it comes to web development, the CSS developer tooling in Firefox is second-to-none. But when it comes to JavaScript and network-related debugging (like service workers), Chrome’s tools are currently better than Firefox’s (for now). For example, Chrome has a tab in its developer tools that lets you run Lighthouse on the currently open tab.

Yesterday, I got the Calibre newsletter, which always has handy performance-related links from Karolina. She pointed to a Lighthouse extension for Firefox. “Excellent!”, I thought, and I immediately installed it. But I had some qualms about installing a plug-in from Google into a browser from Mozilla, particularly as the plug-in page says:

This is not a Recommended Extension. Make sure you trust it before installing

Well, I gave it a go. It turns out that all it actually does is redirect to the online version of Lighthouse. “Hang on”, I thought. “This could just be a bookmarklet!”

So I immediately uninstalled the browser extension and made this bookmarklet:

Lighthouse

Drag that up to your desktop browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Press it whenever you’re on a site that you want to test.

How Google Pagespeed works: Improve Your Score and Search Engine Ranking

Ben shares the secret of SEO. Spoiler: the villain turns out to be Too Much JavaScript. Again.

Time to Interactive (TTI) is the most impactful metric to your performance score.

Therefore, to receive a high PageSpeed score, you will need a speedy TTI measurement.

At a high level, there are two significant factors that hugely influence TTI:

• The amount of JavaScript delivered to the page
• The run time of JavaScript tasks on the main thread

Lights at sea

Lighthouses of the world, mapped.

Lighthouse | Eric Bailey

What if accessibility were a ranking signal for Google search results?

Here’s a thought: what if Google put its thumb on the scale again, only this time for accessibility? What if it treated the Lighthouse accessibility score as a first-class ranking metric?

Home  |  web.dev

I guess this domain name is why our local developmemnt environments stopped working.

Anyway, it’s a web interface onto Lighthouse (note that it has the same bugs as the version of Lighthouse in Chrome). Kind of like webhint.io.

PWA Directory

Another directory of progressive web apps, this time maintained by Google.

I quite like the way it links through to a Lighthouse report. Here’s the listing for The Session, for example, and here’s the corresponding Lighthouse report.

Tips for in-house teams in a free market software culture

A great in-depth report from Alice on creating, running, and most importantly, selling an in-house design system. This makes a great companion piece to her Patterns Day talk.

Where internal teams seem to go wrong is not appreciating that the thing they’re building is still a product and so it needs to compete with other products on the market.

Passive-Aggressive Art Gallery — Justin Cousson

I should do this in the Clearleft kitchen.

The Digital Transition: How the Presidential Transition Works in the Social Media Age | whitehouse.gov

Kori Schulman describes the archiving of social media and other online artefacts of the outgoing US president. It’s a shame that a lot of URLs will break, but I’m glad there’s going to be a public backup available.

Best of all, you can get involved:

In the interim, we’re inviting the American public – from students and data engineers, to artists and researchers – to come up with creative ways to archive this content and make it both useful and available for years to come. From Twitter bots and art projects to printed books and query tools, we’re open to it all.

as days pass by — Programmatic Progressiveness

Stuart’s ideas for Lighthouse sound a lot like the resilience validator tool that Scott mentioned recently.

This is our chance to help stamp out sites that don’t do things right, and help define that a progressive web app should actually be progressive.

If you have ideas on this, please file an issue.

Keeping a smart home guest-friendly — Sensors and sensibility

In web development, we have this concept of progressive enhancement, which means that you start by building websites with the very most basic blocks - HTML elements. Then you enhance those basic elements with CSS to make them look better, then you add JavaScript to make them whizzy - the benefit being that if the JS or the CSS fail to load, you’ve still go the basic usable blocks underneath. I’m following this same principle in the house.

Related: this great chat between Jen Simmons and Stephanie Rieger.

Bytes Conference Brighton - A mini-conference on 29th October

This looks like it’s going to be a great evening event. Charlotte and Rosa are both speaking at it, which makes it unmissable in my book.

The very affordable tickets go on sale on Friday, and all the proceeds go to charity.

Improving Reality 2014 — Visibility Is A Trap

Lighthouse are putting on their Improving Reality conference again this year. It’s the day before dConstruct. Come to both!

If you’re already in Brighton for dConstruct this week, there are two art shows you might want to check out:

Timo Arnall and friends are presenting their Immaterials exhibit at Lighthouse, 28 Kensington Street. Timo has written a few words about the exhibit. The exhibition is open from tomorrow, September 5th until October 13th, and the opening is tonight, Wednesday, at 6pm.

Just around the corner at the Ink-d gallery on North Road, the opening of Jon Burgerman’s exhibit is happening at exactly the same time: 6pm this evening. His Failure of Judgement exhibition runs from tomorrow, September 5th to October 6th.

Jon’s opening will also include the debut of the world’s first “Jon Burgerman Veggie Burger” courtesy of Burger Brothers next door.

And if you haven’t gorged yourself too much on art after this evening, don’t forget that there’s a whole programme of different art shows running this month at 68 Middle Street.

In San Francisco, a house with its own Twitter feed in MIT Technology Review

A profile of Tom’s house.

It’s weird how normal this is.

Brighton Science Festival Edo Wonderpark Hack Day

There’s going to be mini Science Hack Day at Lighthouse as part of this month’s Science Festival in Brighton. Come along — it’ll be fun.