The Kestrel Echo*

Inspired by a conversation over on Forrst I quickly put together this little plug-in. Via CURL it checks if it can access the Google API hosted jQuery library. If it can see it then it queues it up otherwise it rolls with the version of the jQuery library that came with your current WP install.

By using the cURL library to check the availability of the Google CDN hosted jQuery library this simple plug-in offers a selection of benefits. By using the remote jQuery you increase the potential for decreased latency, improved parallelism and better cacheing, as detailed in this post on Encosia. On top of these benefits there is the beneficial side-affect of this jQuery being on a Google server. If your site is compromised by a hack, the jQuery file is one less thing to worry about as I am confident Google are going to be sufficiently hardened to resist all attacks.

This plug-in is available from the WordPress repository.

Changelog

0.3 – 11 March 2011

• Add a Settings page with an option to select your preferred CDN script

0.2 – 4 October 2010

• Add work around for the unresolved issue of Google API jQuery causing admin area editor functionality to become frozen.

0.1.1 – 5 August 2010

• Add function_exists check for curl_init. Protects against hosts without this library pre-installed.

0.1 – 21 July 2010

• Posted to the WP plug-in repository.