Yahoo has a well earned reputation as being a steadfast champion of the open-source community.

And so it was with little surprise I leaned of a fantastic little tool for Firefox/Firebug called YSlow. Your going to need Firebug and Firefox to play along, although Explorer's version should be along soon.

Yahoo's download page is simply enough, just head on over and download the plugin.

The premise behind the plugin is simple. When activated, the tool watches how a page on your site loads and reports this activity back to you in the form of a performance analysis.

The report is broken into 13 "performance rules", each dealing with a specific type of server interaction or delivery method. Your goal is to receive the highest grade possible using a very familiar format: A through F.

After a quick install I went ahead and ran the tool on Yahoo's own YSlow page, and somewhat to my surprise, the grade came back as 'C' (see figure 1).

Fair enough--Yahoo's own page gets an average grade. A quick glance at the results reveals failing grades for 'Use CDN', and 'Add and Expires Header'.

Expires Header what and CDN who???

Exactly. But don't fret, Yahoo provides a detailed write up on each category. Based off a quick read though it seemd as if each category made plenty of sense, and so it was with great excitement I determined I'd have no trouble besting Yahoo at its own game with SledXChange::Tech. Or would I?

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