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Great article explaining one of the easiest ways to speed your website up – http caching. It covers the scenario wherein the the end user is talking directly to the web server and caching locally, and the slightly more complicated version, which puts a caching server between the two, offering a couple places in which content can be cached. If you’re not using Expires, jump into your web server and fire it up (and go turn on deflate while you’re at it).

A few useful jQuery plugins – Cycle, Corner and Hint. At work, we tend to use the pattern that Cycle implements fairly frequently. Rounded corners, depending on how subtle, can sometimes to fall into the “that’ll degrade nicely to square corners for IE users” category. Hint is something that we’d only use in very specific situations, but it’s nice to have that arrow in the quiver.

This is a slick and well-tested set of server-side best practices, CSS, and HTML for getting the most out of your site.

Addendum: here’s an excellent video by the author, explaining the features in detail:

The mantra “Fat models, skinny controllers”, seems to have been lost on the latest wave of CakePHP users in #cakephp irc://irc.freenode.org/#cakephp. This article will discuss a few ideas that can be used to fatten up your models.