My friend Chris is a Django newbie who has managed to build a whole e-shop site in Django. It will launch on a couple of days and when it launches I will blog about it here too. He sent me this today which gave me a smile:
"I spent today setting up django_static for the site, and optimising it for performance. If there's one thing I've learned from you, it's optimisation.
So, my homepage is now under 100KB (was 330KB), and it loads in @5-6 seconds from hard refresh (was 13-14 seconds at its worst). And I just got a 92 score on Yslow. I do believe I have the fastest tea website around now, and I still haven't installed caching.
Wicked huh?"
He's talking about using django-static. Then I get another email shortly after with this:
"correction - I get 97 on YSlow if I use a VPN.
I just found that the Great Firewall tags extra HTTP requests onto every request I make from my browser, pinging a server in Shanghai with a PHP script which probably checks the page for its content or if its on some kind of blocked list. Cheeky buggers!"
It's that interesting! (Note: Chris is based in China but hosts the test site in the UK)