Website Security and Page Speed

Barry Chapman

More changes are abound!

 

Security

 

I received a couple of comments over the weeks since the new site launched, primarily targeted at our web security practices. First and foremost, our management of user account information; with login process at a close second.

 

As a security company, we consider our website to serve as a representation of what we are, and the fact that anyone had to question these was really an eye opener. The first concern was ‘how do we manage our user account information?’ All user data is stored in a secure database within our datacenter. This data was initially collected via user registration over an unsecure connection (the second concern). Since we were not doing any transactions that warranted the immediate security guaranteed by SSL/TLS, we opted to incorporate it into the site in a second phase.

 

Now, when you visit our login page, you will notice that it is now over a secure connection. In fact, anything that is related to user profile, registration, and login; is all done over a secure connection. As always, I welcome comments and feedback about the integrity of our site.

 

Page Speed

 

You may have noticed (if you are anything like me) that we have a lot of Javascript files and CSS files on our site. These are separated for the sole purpose of making items easier to find and keep up to date. At any given time, when loading a page on our site, the browser would make upwards of 27 requests to the server to download the necessary files. This has a significant performance impact when browsing a website, hampering the usability of that website.

 

To correct this, a mechanism was implemented that would compact all the Javascript and CSS files to remove any whitespace, new lines, comments; and also combining all the files into one file which is then gzipped by the server. All these methods reduce the number of requests the browser must make, and also the size of the file(s) being downloaded.

 

With any change like this, bugs are to be expected. I have done my best to correct all of them, but there may be some lurking. The following can be expected:

 

• CSS errors (things not looking QUITE right)
• Javascript errors (result of compacting files)

 

If you encounter any of these issues, please either leave a comment or send me an email at webmaster@anx.com. I will do my best to correct the issue(s) in a timely manner. Feel free to post any questions you have about the site also!