Rule #1 in website optimization is to enable GZip compression on the web server. This is very easy using web.config as explained here. However, some web servers have disabled automatic compression of JavaScript files, because they are served with the content type: application/x-javascript.

For these web servers we can use a web.config trick to change the content type of JavaScript files to text/javascript. This is a completely valid content type supported by all browsers.

Just paste the following XML snippet in to your web.config’s <system.webServer> section.

<staticContent>
  <remove fileExtension=".js"/>
  <mimeMap fileExtension=".js" mimeType="text/javascript" />
</staticContent>

Chances are that you don’t have this issue, since it seems to only apply to some hosters, but now you know how to get around it should you ever end up in the situation with uncompressed JavaScript files.

So you just built a website and are about to make it public to the world. You go through a few checks to make sure that everything works as expected. Perhaps run HTML validation and other similar services.

But are you sure you remembered to implement all the best practices? Does it look good on mobile devices, in Windows 8 snapped view and what about basic accessibility?

Enter Web Developer Checklist

We’ve tried to come up with the complete list of tasks and checks that every web developer should go through when developing any kind of website. The Web Developer Checklist is structured in a way that makes it really easy to follow the progress as well as getting help to perform all the checks.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.