On the page size theme…
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:
- Images to single sprite png/gif
- Optimise / reduce / merge fancybox into own style sheet
- Create something to minify javascript & style sheets without affecting readability and ease of updating
- Try different CDN for jQuery (MS?)
Thursday Nov 4th
Keep it down
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
Firesheep’s a Huge Hit with Amateur Hackers
Firesheep, an amateur hacking tool, has been downloaded more than 104,000 times a mere 24 hours after its launch, according to TechCrunch.
Firesheep is a Firefox add-on programmed by Seattle-based software developer Eric Butler, who says he designed the extension to demonstrate the HTTP vulnerability in certain websites (such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Yelp). The extension basically allows people to view information traded over a public network, in the form of cookies — when someone logs on to one of the 26 sites in Firesheep’s database, their information is vulnerable to being swiped.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/208773/firesheeps_a_huge_hit_with_amateur_hackers.html
I’m stuggling with the name a little though…
Wednesday Oct 27th
cufon font replacer
I’m behind.
Just noticed this in use on someone else’s tumblr theme.
“Fast text replacement with canvas and VML - no Flash or images required.”
http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/
Needless to say, performance pending, I will be having a look at integrating this.
Tuesday Oct 26th
Using twitter with maintenance/502 web pages
In dark times of site maintenance (force or unforced) why not use a light twitter feed on a 502 (or similar) coded page?
Bearing in mind that any custom error page should be light, you could easily call the API and give your users real-time updates on why the site might be down/unavailable and possible ETA on when the site might be back online again.
Wednesday Jul 28th
