I was recently reminded of an interesting situation that arose a while back at Yahoo! London; a situation that was resolved using simple testing and demonstration:

We had recently begun extensive performance optimisation of the Yahoo! Eurosport site in an attempt to improve our YSlow grades. At the time, the design of the Yahoo! Eurosport site used rounded corners on all of the modules. Due to the fact that we had developed the modules to be bulletproof, and because the backgrounds varied slightly for different modules, this ended up with a considerable overhead on CSS backgrounds.

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I need to make a confession: I have a bit of a nerdy obsession with Content Management Systems. This probably stems from the fact that I’ve built several, worked with a number of internal bespoke systems, and have also been involved in implementing an off-the-shelf solution for a number of large sites. As an addition, I’ve also worked with—and built—several blog publishing systems, which can be viewed as the most basic bespoke CMSs. The upshot of all that is that I’ve spent so long on CMS related problems, solving them has become a rewarding experience.

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Recently, I bought myself a brand new MacBook Pro, which gave me the perfect opportunity to clean up my development environment. Since I’ve started doing all of my development on virtual machines, I began thinking about my development workflow: In theory, I should be able to model the perfect server environment virtually.

I wasn’t sure what environment I wanted to end up with, but I had a good idea what basic virtual machines I wanted as a starting layout.

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