Martin Crockett

Disaster for Dorna Sports: a decision to hand over the TV rights for MotoGP to the BBC has been met with howls of derision with European (and worldwide if website forums posts are to be understood) motorcycle racing fans. The BBC have long-standing sketchy coverage of MotoGP. The commentary team of Steve Parish and Charlie Cox (an Australian British Saloon Car champion and British GT champion, note: car) are widely regarded as very poor, they have never given airtime to the 125 and 250 classes (let’s face it-that’s where the real racing has been of late) and frequently cut the coverage in favour of other sports.

Dorna Sports has announced that the 2008 MotoGP World Championship will be the last to be broadcast by Eurosport.

“After many years of successful collaboration, MotoGP rights-holders Dorna Sports would like to announce that coverage of the MotoGP World Championships will no longer be available on Eurosport from the 2009 season,” read a statement from Dorna.

“Dorna would like to thank Eurosport for a partnership which has been of mutual benefit for several years, having helped take MotoGP to new levels of popularity and coverage whilst also offering the pan-European broadcaster impressive viewing figures.

Crash.net

I agree that the British Eurosport commentary line-up of Toby Moody, Julian Ryder and former 500cc star Randy Mamola is one of the best in the business. Eurosport’s full-on live coverage often includes all three days at each grand prix: practice, qualifying and race day.
Will the BBC do the same? I predict not.

Crash.net forum 350+ comments.
Yahoo!/Eurosport forums 100+ comments.
Isle Of Man TT Official site forums 25+ comments.

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Kirk from Just Thinkin’ came up with a fix for the peculiar piece of code that was re-introduced into WordPress 2.5 which displays the version number of your WP install in your theme. This was previously found in the header.php file of the theme.

WordPress 2.5 Plugin Keeps the Version out of Source.

Here are 23 ways to optimise your website.

i-marco.nl (6)

1. Reducing graphic file sizes
2. Reducing the amount of images
3. Forcing the browser to perform more simultaneous server requests
4. Script tags in your header? Move them to the bottom.
5. Even less HTTP requests: merging CSS and Javascript
6. Adding GZip compression

Yahoo! (14)

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make AJAX Cacheable

Use CSS shorthand properties
e.g. body { background: url("bg.gif"); background-color: #fff; background-repeat: repeat-x; }

Cache your content
Make use of caching plugins, in this case for WordPress, like wp-cache.

Use a trailing slash at the end of directory or root URLs
This avoids the server roundtrip: “the trailing slash tells the server to use the default document list for that folder and load that page. Without it the server first looks for a matching document name, then a folder with that name and use default doc list, finally performing a redirect (302) to that document. So using the trailing slash saves a certain amount of server load and aids the speed the document will load.”

Further reading:
On a quest for ultimate website performance
Yahoo! Developer
Faster Page Loads - Bundle Your CSS and Javascript
CSS shorthand
Web Site Optimization
PHP Packer
Clean CSS

Does anyone really use the XFN XHTML Friends Network?