Site load testing with JMeter
Mar/100
We are in the process of deploying a large site on a platform only tested with small site.. The first thing we had to do was load test it.
What I wanted was something to “spider” the site and follow links for a certain period of time simulating lots of users. Hitting the same page over and over again just doesn’t cut when you are caching pages and want to test the load required to bring them into cache and deliver them.
I found JMeter. Its is a great application from the Apache Jakarta project but confusing to say the least when it comes to configuration.
After digging around I found a nice set up to do exactly this:
* Thread Group (Continue on error)
* HTTP Request (Site URL, path [enter homepage or seed url] )
* While Controller (Condition = “LAST”)
* * HTTP Request (Site URL, path [.*])
* * HTML Link Parser
* * Gaussian Random Timer
This gives me a good spread of URL’s at good random intervals.
Huge thanks to this jmeter newsgroup post by Jason.
Wireframing
Sep/091
Wire-framing is a pretty hot topic at the moment with a lot of discussions and tutorials emerging lately. Smashing Magazine have an excellent (as usual) round-up of the latest techniques and applications for this crucial part of the application development process.
I use Axure but feel I have been falling into the trap of making them too detailed and graphic. Axure encourages this with its amazing tools and interactivity but I need to learn to temper the inclination to make it pretty and let the viewer focus on the layout and features.
Axure 5.6 was released last week after a short beta period and introduced some killer features that include converting any widget to a master or dynamic panel. This feature alone is worth the upgrade.
Some other Axure resources I’ve found useful lately include:
- Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit
- A Clean Design Pattern Library and Better Defaults
- William Design Patterns
- AXLIB
- Key Icons Icon Collection
Happy Wire-framing
Whats my deliverable?
Jul/090
Identifying the correct deliverable for a IA/UX project can be difficult. If your a developer its easy, its code, if your a copywriter its .. well.. copy.
Peter Morville at Semantic Studios has written a great post on UX deliverables (some time ago now.. but better late than never) where he identifies a raft of possible deliverables.
Whilst most are a step in the process and I imagine most UX projects would require a combination of these I love the idea of delivering a “proverb”.
He’s even packaged them up into a wonderfull “treasure map”.
Peter Morville's UX Treasure Map
Whats the weather like?
Jul/090
A very exciting thing happened to me about a month ago… I got a new job.
That may not sound unusual but I’ve been at my current job for 6 and a half years and its going to be a big shock to the system. I had a great time at Lateral Systems and ill be sad to go but its time to move on.
My new role will be User Experience Architect @ The Weather Company. They have several web properties, including the flagship WeatherZone, and it will be my job to help them fine tune the existing sites and integrate some exciting new data. As you can imagine there is lots of data to play with and everyone has a keen interest in the weather so I’m very excited to embarking on this new journey.
Ill let you know how I get on but I’m sure the forecast is fine and sunny 
Fixing the zoom:1; IE fix?
Jun/090
Much has been written about the “magical fix” that *{zoom:1; } has on IE6 and IE7. By using this to force hasLayout onto IE a lot of the display issues we are used to are fixed easily.
BUT.. as i’ve just discovered… it can also create some of its own problems.
I had an issue reffered to me where IE6 was rendering some text way out of alignment, it seemed like a float clearing problem but clearing didnt have any affect. So I removed the zoom declaration and and that removed the problem, but restored a bunch of other problems the initial zoom:1; had fixed.
So, I had to find a way to reset the zoom property and the answer is “normal”. I also has to use * to apply it to ALL items in that box.
Mashable Web Design Toolbox
Nov/080
Mashable have created a great list of sites that do everything from creating heatmaps of your site to making fav icons!
Browser here Browser there.. Browser’s everywhere!
Sep/080
Well its an exciting month for browsers what with Google entering the fray and Microsoft dropping IE8 Beta 2 to the public.
Much has been written about both so I wont delve into it too much but to say I think its very exciting.
Google's business is the web so its no shock they've built a browser and that they seem to have done it well. The javascript engine is lightning fast and I havent found many layout problems. Whilst Mozilla have done a great job with Firefox I expect to see Chrome surpase it in browser stats within a few months and start to eat into IE's % also. Maybe it will also give MS another jolt towards a better browser.
photostream
