restlessmedia. posts from a UK web developer and music enthusiast.

I sent my site to fat camp this weekend, and it’s been for the better.

No more fat scripting pies, from now on, low fat minified ones. I’ve trimmed and merged those sickly stylesheets and no more cola for the images, there’s just 2 sprites (diet) and a couple of repeating backgrounds.

Monday Nov 22nd

• optimise

Safari on the iPhone will only cache objects that are under 25k.

Saturday Nov 13th

• iphone
• development
• optimise

So, those pesky images are taking up 70/80% of the page weight.

Now this I’m not too fussed about on a blog, some of the posts are done on the move and optimising images would be a bit of a pain, especially when sourced from somewhere else.  Also, since some pages are bigger than others, and due to the nature of a blog - this will go up and down all the time.

The next thing is scripts.  The biggest are coming from google (for analytics and their jQuery CDN) which again, is not really a major problem.

Last to worry about is the style sheets - 14k of the declarations are mine.  I could minify this and reduce the fancybox style sheets but because I want to leave the style sheets in a readable form so I can edit from different locations.

On my todo list:

1. Images to single sprite png/gif
2. Optimise / reduce / merge fancybox into own style sheet
3. Create something to minify javascript & style sheets without affecting readability and ease of updating
4. Try different CDN for jQuery (MS?)

Thursday Nov 4th

• web
• optimise

Web designers, keep those page sizes down. It’s for your own good.

According to Akamai’s State of the Internet report, 28% of Internet connections in the United States are slower than 2 Mbit/s, and only 30% are 5 Mbit/s or faster. Almost 3% are slower than 256 kbit/s.

That’s in the United States, a country relatively far ahead on the Internet. The worldwide average is worse: 41% of Internet connections are slower than 2 Mbit/s, 22% are 5 Mbit/s or faster, and 4.6% are slower than 256 kbit/s.

Read more…
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/10/27/web-designers-keep-that-page-size-down

Thursday Nov 4th

• web
• optimise