The TechFounder blog has a few general tips you can use to help your web pages go a bit faster:

As it might be expected, there are several techniques to optimize the delivery of web pages. The Exceptional Performance guide by Yahoo is a great resource for a multitude of optimizations practices, including specifically two techniques which I will address in this article - script minifcation and concatenation.

Suggestions include reducing total request counts and minification of external libraries via the Minify tool.

The Developer Tutorials site has posted a new article covering the creation of a small application that can help you scrape content from a remote page and pull it into your script.

In this tutorial you will learn how to build a PHP script that scrapes links from any web page.

You'll learn to use cURL, the DOM functions, XPath and a bit of MySQL to get the job done. It's nice to see that they also include a section looking at one of the more touchy aspects of web page scraping - "is it legal?"

DevShed has posted part one of a new pair of articles that show how to use inheritance in your PHP applications.

In the two articles in this series I'm going to show you how to build a sample object-based web site from its bare bones structure, by using the encapsulated logic of some parent and child PHP 5 classes. In this way I'll demonstrate how inheritance can be used to tackle a concrete project, such as constructing dynamic web pages.

In part one, they build the foundation of their sample application - a web page builder - by defining the WebPage class and abstract methods for it like buildHeader, buildStyles and buildBody. Inheriting from this, they build a HomeWebPage class that defines the methods and values to create a simple page. They take it even a step further and build an AboutUsWebPage to show another implementation.

From Hasin Hayder's blog, there's a new tutorial demonstrating how to use the newly released WebThumb API from Joshua Eichorn to create thumbnails of websites dynamically.

Using WebThumb API, you can generate a thumbnail in three steps. First you have to place a request containing the URL. As soon as your request is successful, WebThumb store your request in queue. That means you are not getting the thumbnail instantly (well, there are other factors also. to fetch an url requires time, so it is not possible to generate the thumbnail in real time).

In second step you have to check whether your thumbnail has been generated or it is still in the queue. If you get a green signal, you will proceed to the third step where you have to request a download URL of your thumbnails.

He shows how to make a request to the API, check how your request is doing (status), and grabbing the thumbnail it's generated. Then, it's on to the code, and a complete PHP script (using cURL) to make the complete request to the API, including waiting for the image to be finished to grab it.