Hosted Blogger - I love it, but these sites are so slow. I have been looking to tweak Blogger performance for a couple of months now, and with a little help of Google App Engine I am slowly getting there. In a previous post I mentioned the use of the App Engine as a Content Delivery Network. This really helps and gives you an opportunity to store your CSS, images and other files.

However, the App Engine sports a lot more goodies for the web site tweaker. From today, I am using a proxy server in the cloud to serve my files - including css, javascript and images. It's a port of open-source Mirrorrr, one of the proxy services that you can use if you want to surf without IP restrictions. It operates from the Google network, uses the Memcache API for caching and the GAE automatically Gzips everything that comes out of it. This way, my site loads a lot quicker.

Currently, I modified it to work with Centrical domains only - to prevent Google from shutting down the app if too many people would use it. However, I am not a programmer, so for most of you it would be fairly easy to do it yourself.

So, now I have a solution for my own files. Unfortunately, the javascripts that Blogger spits out are still uncompressed and huge. So, if anyone would know how to manipulate the URL of those scripts (to run them through my proxy server), it would be greatly appreciated.