There is never a better time to put your unwanted junk on eBay. Thanksgiving brings a great deal of people in front of a computer who are avoiding family. Not to mention snagging the real early Black Friday goers or the anti Black Friday people like myself who refuse to succumb to the madness. I stick to the register line free online realm.
Like a lot of other 9-5 stiffs there is quite a few things on my computer todo list for when I take time off. Computer parts for upgrades or new machines are going to be sought out for the cheapest price. I know this year I will be on the selling end of those parts, my basement stash has started to build up again.
I currently have a laptop hard drive up for sale, 120 GB SATA drive that has about eight months of light use. Still works, I just upgraded to a larger drive and no longer need this one.
I am sure as the day goes on ill be putting more up and now that I have a tripod for my camera the photos will be as clear as ever. Happy Thanksbidding!
All of our sites have three style sheets, an “all”, “handheld” and “print” all necessary to a well rounded web experience.
Problem
They come at a cost tho, three HTTP requests each page load. It doesn’t seem too bad when you get 1000 visitors a day or each file is only 100k but it get infinitely compounded when 40,000 visitors a day and the css weigh in at ~5kb total. Just in the access log alone that is 3 lines per visitor or ~160 bytes totaling ~6.4 megs of log data a day.
Solution
@media – The hidden killer.. er.. saviour. Combining all those style sheets into one and using @media to separate the pieces.
A reduction of 2 less HTTP requests and 2/3 less data being written to the access log. Compression saves ~20% of the css size but combining into one file reduces the overhead of the 1kb or 500b for the mobile and print style. Multiply that by 22% of our new visitors a day with an empty cache is a savings of ~24,000 HTTP requests a day.
I would say that its well worth it, reducing the amount of net traffic while still presenting the same amount of information. Although this is straight data without compression, things really start to get interesting when compression is added to the mix, stay tuned.
Overseeing the current Wayne State University homepage is like running with a tiny pebble in your shoe. You feel it every step but your going so fast you cannot stop to take it out.
Working with a site so large it can become discouraging but taking one step at a time one can accomplish anything. Yesterday we took our first step, moving the site to a new server in an environment that we are comfortable and flexible in.
The old version of the site was sitting on an NT box, a requirement of the company who built it over 4 years ago. When I started I had a few goals, one was to get the site off that server and get it validated and rewritten in POSH. Well that day has come and we managed to sprinkle in a few other goodies along the way, here are some highlights:
It took some work to get here but we made it. There is still some tweaking to go but all in all its setup. Now its time to concentrate on the content, we are going to be doing a page by page overhaul and adding greater functionality and layout to each child page.
In addition to the content we will also be shrinking the file size and HTTP requests further and further down to the base minimum. Right now we are ~90k depending on the panel that loads and 16 HTTP requests with an empty cache, we hope to cut the size down by a third and get rid of 2-4 requests.
Taking something large and packaging it into something short, sweet and understandable is a designers passion. Taking a step back it is also a programmer and teachers passion.
Yesterday I had the honor to give a top down talk and tutorial of a web site manager to my Senior Seminar group. This included all the logic behind a site managers functionality down to the implementation using PHPSimpl
It was really great to be able to explain my passion for the web and visualize it on a whiteboard to people who initially could not grasp even a part of the process, to in the end being so excited about the system they wanted to run to a computer and start coding.
My first attempt to get the group involved was to trace through a web manager and go into detail about how everything connected, this failed miserably. So taking a step back I reverted back to my love for design and took a high level approach and then lead down to the actual code.
A whiteboard is the best teaching tool in my opinion, you can sit at a computer all day and look at code and understand but without seeing the relationships between everything coding can only go so far. Understanding the whole system only breeds better system development, less chance of code clash and fewer bugs.
What it comes down to is the ability to take the huge world of a program, a site, or a collection of sites and package it up to give relevance to the actual user. We do this when creating navigation for a site all the way to creating features for the content management system which houses over 200 sites.
The best programmers, designers and educators can take the massive amounts of data and sum it up, package it and deliver it directly to the brain to influence excitement and energy into the students and process.
My hat goes to all those teachers out there who get to practice this passion to inspire, keep up the good work.
