I was impressed reading a recent news article in the local newspaper on 18 ministers in Kerala being provided with a website for their respective departments, that keeps track of their profile, reports, achievements and many more. I was initially thinking that the quality of the sites maybe substandard as I have seen many other Indian Government sites, but surprisingly the quality is not at all bad and it already contains many information on each of the state department’s activities. This is a good step and every other state in the country should follow it, provided the content is regularly updated and also provides ways for people to reach out and provide suggestions/complaints etc.

YSlow is an extension to the Firebug extension for Firefox. As you might be aware the Firebug extension is a very useful tool for developers to analyze a web page in terms of different components, structure and their construction. YSlow helps one analyze the performance of the website in terms of response times and the difference components within a page that is the result of the overall response time. Web page performance is a combination of implications starting from the page layout to database queries. YSlow helps in analyzing what is visible to the outside world. YSlow is from Yahoo! and they have shared the best practices for improving the performance of the web sites. A good add on Firfeox extension for the developers to keep a tab on the performance right from the beginning.