The first part is here. It was more about building the YUICompressor, writing and running test cases. Now let’s see what the compressor does exactly to your CSS. BTW, you can play with the web UI to see for yourself how the minifier works. Stripping comments and white space This is the bare minimum a […]

Honored to be a part of the YUI project, I am now helping with the maintenance of the CSSMin part of the YUICompressor. My changes are now part of the trunk on github, so I’m official. Next on the agenda is documenting the thing, so that’s what I’ll try to do here, maybe in a […]

So I’ve been thinking and talking to folks about this idea of having one-stop shop for all your minification needs. Minification of JS and CSS as well as image optimization helps site performance by reducing download sizes. This is good. But not a lot of people do it. People don’t do it, because it’s a […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 12 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment (12 articles down, 12 more to go). Stay tuned for the articles to come. Let’s continue the topic of reducing file sizes started with the previous post and talk about making images […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 11 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. After removing all the extra HTTP requests you possibly can from your waterfall, it’s time to make sure that those that are left are as small […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 2 This is the second in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. While theoretically you can speed up your site by just blindly following advice from this blog and other […]

This posts is one of those “note to self” kinda posts. I just finished installing PHP and Apache on my Mac OS 10.5.6 and though I should document the experience should I (or you) need to do it again. It could already be there The default OS install came with goodies like ruby and php […]

UPDATE: Ryan Grove has a better script to display the JSLint results. So basically follow the instructions here until you get to Step 2, point 5 (where you write the command to run JSLint). Then head over to Ryan’s blog post to get the better script. JSLint is an indispensable tool if you’re serious about […]

To quote http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/: Rhino is an open-source implementation of JavaScript written entirely in Java. It is typically embedded into Java applications to provide scripting to end users. Rhino allows you to use JavaScript: on the server-side, so you can ditch RoR, Perl, PH… well, keep PHP 🙂 … in favor of JavaScript on the command […]

ffmpeg is such an amazing tool, looks like it’s for video what ImageMagick is for images. An all-powerful all-formats wicked cool command-line tool. This blog post is an introduction to some of the MP3 capabilities of ffmpeg. I’ll use ffmpeg to transform a blog post into a podcast-ready mp3 file. If you continue to read […]

Since I switched to Mac I need to learn a bunch of stuff I was taking for granted for years. Recently I needed to upload a bigger file or two to my server and scp is not the tool for the job. So instead of starting a hunt for a decent free FTP client, I […]

JPEGtran is cool because it lets you optimize JPEG images losslessly by: Stripping meta data (meta is sometimes bulky and useless for web display) Optimizing Huffman tables or Convert a JPEG to progressive encoding From my experience 1 is more important than 2 or 3 and 3 gives better results than 2 for images over […]

… but doesn’t write PNG8 with alpha transparency, unfortunately. This comment on the YUI blog got me all excited by the possibility of having another designers tool other than Fireworks that creates PNG8 (palette PNGs) with alpha transparency. Overall Paint.NET is a very simple and friendly program (as a non-designer I’m often intimidated by Photoshop’s […]

ExifTool looks like a very promising tool to fiddle with all sorts of JPEG metadata (needed for smush.it) but first I had to make sure I can install it on Dreamhost. Although installation didn’t go as described on the exiftool site (since I don’t have sudo access on Dreamhost), it’s still installable and it’s actually […]

Smush.it is getting more and more buzz all over the internets. Now there’s even a song about it! Me and Nicole are pretty busy answering email, but a little slow to document the thing, I though I should at least shed some light on how the tool works by using some of the presentations. What […]

Since me and Nicole announced smush.it yesterday at Ajax Experience and thanks to Christian Heilmann posting it on Ajaxian and Yahoo Developer Network, this thing seems to have exploded! It’s all over the blogosphere, twitter-sphere and every other sphere. BTW, Chris never seizes to amaze – he posted the video on Ajaxian at 11:01 am […]

Some time ago I posted the slides from my Velocity 2008 talk on Slideshare and since the slides have tables, all the tables came out with the wrong font and all messed up and misplaced. Instead of trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with Powerpoint and how to work around it, I […]

HTTPFox is an interesting Firefox extension for monitoring the HTTP traffic, obviously inspired by the IE-only commercial HttpWatch. HTTPFox shows some stuff that are missing from Firebug’s Net Panel, such as requests for favicons and such. There’s also a little search box that lets you filter the list of components. Pretty cool too is the […]

Helps you easily turn any javascript code into a bookmarklet and post on your blog: http://tools.w3clubs.com/bookmaker/

Always wanted to create a Firefox extension? Or a Firebug extension? Here’s an easy way to take off the ground, no more excuses. Firefox Extensions The way most people get started with creating a Firefox extension is copying an existing extension and tweaking. This is not the best way as you can guess, the best […]

Steve Souders, performance architect at Yahoo, announced today the public release of YSlow. What’s YSlow? It’s an extension to Firebug (yes, correct, Firebug, not Firefox) that helps with performance optimization efforts. It scores your page on the scale A to F, based on compliance with Yahoo’s performance rules. It’s a tool that has been used […]

Added: – generation of a GIF sprite in addition to the PNG – small client-side only check if at least two files are updated – link to a Yahoo search for “css sprites” – note begging people not to upload huge files Only the first thing is a feature, the other three are to raise […]

Here are some convenient tools I’ve added to my TextPad editor, hope you’ll like ’em. TextPad tools Stuff can easily be added to TextPad’s Tools menu, like I did, shown on the screenshot. In order to do so, you go Configure -> Preferences. Then select Tools on the tree to the left, then Add. You […]

Here are two bookmarklets that could make your life easier when trying to figure out why in IE a page behave as wrong as it behaves. For Firefox we have Firebug, so none of this is necessary. For IE we have also Firebug lite (see my post), but you need some setup before you can […]

Let’s say you want to quickly try out some small stylesheet changes, but you don’t want to (or prefer not to, or for some reason temporarily you just can’t) modify your application’s CSS file(s). In FF it’s easy – you have Firebug and you can play with styles until blue in the face. And in […]