For some time I’ve been struggling with a problem with my Google Maps API – an error that will sometimes appear in Internet Explorer.

Anyway, I did some research yesterday and found a number of possible solutions. They all revolve around the idea that IE doesn’t like you displaying the map until the page has completed.

The three solutions I found were…

1. Load the map script using an onload event
2. Use the setTimeout javascript function to delay the execution of the code
3. Move the javascript to the end of the HTML

I used the third one and it now appears to have cured the problem. Hoorah!

XP SP3 is due to pop-up on Automatic Updates very soon.

In the meantime you can download it directly from Microsoft. This is the final, release version of the SP.

As well as rolling up past fixes, this adds new features ported from Vista and early reviewers suggest that it increases performance by up to 10%.

Me? I’m installing this as soon as possible. Who needs Vista?

After spending much time over the last couple of months looking at improving website performance I took the plunge and even bought a book on the subject – I find reading technical material in book form far easier than online.

Anyway, High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders is recommended.

Now that the plug is out of the way, I am happy to report that on a test version of the BMTG site, I’ve finally achieved my goal – the best YSlow score I’m likely to achieve – a grade B (88%). The remaining 12% is down to not having a CDN and due to Google Analytics not having an expires header. Anyway, this translates to a 19% increase in speed compared to the current site.

The current site (launched a couple of weeks ago) had massive improvements made to it but only achieved a grade D (64%) score. The previous version of the site was a grade F.

The changes I’ve made were those that weren’t covered by PHP Speedy – namely having an expires header for image files and turning off eTags. This was acheived by the following lines added to my .htaccess file…

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 6 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 6 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 6 months"
Header unset ETag
FileETag None