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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

«Radical Image Optimization Tool»

I made 3 changes to the blog:

  1. Optimized background image filesize
  2. Reduced posts shown on the homepage
  3. Brought back the embedded comment form

Using the Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT), I shrank the filesize of a few of the background images in the blog layout. It only amounted to a total gain of 38,677 bytes, but anything helps speed up the page load.

It didn't seem to gain anything on jpg images without further quality loss. However, it did gain on changing some of the gif images to png images. That surprised me a bit. I've always thought gif was a smaller format than png. Gif is limited to a 256 color index and has a very basic alpha channel (transparency). Whereas png can be truecolor and has better alpha channel support.

I also reduced the number of posts shown on the homepage down from 9 posts to 7 days. I almost always make a single post a day, so this should usually be 7 posts shown on the homepage. Again, in an attempt to speed up load times. I also figured it makes sense to show a week's worth of posts. I don't need any more than that.

I also brought back the embedded comment form. I got around the issue I had with it by providing a link to the old comment page. So you'll see that at the bottom of every post page.

5 comments:

  1. Cool.

    Question. What are the little directional arrows on each post? Do they serve a purpose or are they just to show that the date shown is for the post beneath?

    Just curious.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @ Monique: Yeah, those are just so show the date.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sort-of late to point this out now, but the directional arrows on each post are gone. Now there's a little calendar icon next to the date.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi there,

    Like your solution with the link to the traditional comment form. When I try this myself, however, blogger changes the expr bit into something that isn't working. Any ideas on this?

    Dennis

    ReplyDelete
  5. @ Schmitzl: Humm... "expr:" tells blogger that it's about to see an expression. It's all over in the code.

    Are you by chance using the old style template code? That doesn't support expressions.

    ReplyDelete

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