A YSlow tip for speeding up Viddler embeds

YSlow is a wonderful Firebug plugin from Yahoo! that helps you optimize your web sites by analyzing them according to 13 rules for high performance web sites as written by the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team.

I just started playing with it on my site and one of the things it pointed out was that the default Viddler embed URL for the SWX screencast was redirecting to a different URL. Removing that redirection should speed things up according to Rule 11: Avoid Redirects and you should be able to apply this to all embedded Viddler videos.

Simply change the URL that is given to you by Viddler from the form

http://www.viddler.com/player/ad098fea/

to

http://www.viddler.com/flash/publisher.swf?key=ad098fea

and you'll remove the redirect and speed up the loading of the video.

I do hope that Viddler modifies the code that their Embed feature creates to use this direct URL and, also, to provide the option of embedding the video at its original size without your having to calculate it yourself.

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