Image optimization – in Chinese
Thanks to Joseph Jiang who translated in Chinese parts of my image optimization articles from the YUI blog If you read Chinese, visit http://josephj.com/entry.php?id=209.
Countries visited in 2008
Counting how many countries I’ve been to in 2008: USA Canada Bulgaria Germany (not really, changing flights) Italy China Mexico US states California Massachusetts New Hampshire Arizona Georgia On top of that I did at least 10 LAX-SJC trips. So I traveled quite a bit this year (relatively, I guess, for someone not in sales […]
Merry Christmas 2008!
Best wishes to everyone! Here’s a rendition of Jingle Bells I recorded today (kinda punky and heavily inspired by Pearl Jam’s 2007 Christmas single). Enjoy. » Jingle-Bells.mp3
Paint.NET is cool…
… 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 […]
Installing ExifTool on Dreamhost
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 […]
PNG optimization tools
I’m currently experimenting with different tools for optimizing PNG images to figure out strengths/weaknesses of each. Only considering free, ideally open-source, tools that can be run from the command line. For smush.it I just picked pngcrush for no particluar reason and I was thinking that once I have the optimization tool up and running and […]
Start wearing purple
Today was officially my first day at my new job at in Yahoo! Search. In the spirit of less-is-more I’m stepping out of the position of improving the performance of all Yahoo’s sites worldwide to improving the performance of just one Yahoo! Search – in the US first, then maybe helping globally. I’m excited by […]
image diff
Was having fun today with idiff.php – a PHP shell script to tell you if two images are visually different by comparing them pixel by pixel. If there’s a difference, the script creates a third image – black background with the different pixels in green. Only after writing the script I found that there’s an […]
php|works Atlanta
Thanks to everyone who attended my image optimization talk at the php|works + PyWorks conference in Atlanta. And thanks for all the questions! I love questions, feels more natural – just geeks talking to geeks – as opposed to one guy sitting on a podium and talking. And the slides: Image Optimization for the Web […]
Social network marketing – lessons from the elected president
If you haven’t heard, there is something called “social network marketing” now, basically using (hopefully not abusing) social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to make noise about you, your services, etc. With so many SN sites out there, where is your time and effort best spend? Comes Obama. He’s probably not spending all […]
Best open-source PHP CMS 2008
It’s that time of the year again. Time to cast my vote as part of the jury in Packt’s open-source awards, category “PHP CMS”. (for my last year’s rant, check the internet archive copy) How to judge a CMS? How to judge a CMS? Tough one. How do you judge any piece of software anyway? […]
smush.it update
What’s new in smush.it? The old domain smushit.com now redirects to the new one smush.it, which is what we originally intended but the domain registration took a while and we quickly got smushit.com just in time for the Ajax Experience announcement of the tool There’s a bookmarklet version of the Firefox extension so you can […]
Short Amazon affiliate links – a bookmarklet
It’s a pain to link to a specific product on Amazon if you have to use their UI to build an affiliate link. It’s good to have nice, clean and short affiliate links. This post gives you the details and also a bookmarklet to built the links by visiting the product page you want to […]
Javascript console in IE
I’m a sucker for consoles. The ability to quickly type some code and see it executed right then and there… priceless. That’s why I’m a huge fan of Firebug’s JavaScript console. But what about IE? option 1 – Firebug lite Firebug lite is a lighter version of the proper Firebug which runs in browsers other […]
JavaScript’s class-less objects
“JavaScript’s class-less objects” article up at the JavaRanch’s newsletter. Update: and mentioned on Ajaxian, sweet.
Smush.it presentations
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 […]
smush.it is a smash hit
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 […]
OOJS book free chapter 8 on YUIblog
Chapter 8 of the Object-Oriented JavaScript is available at the YUIblog.com. Enjoy! Chapter 2 is also available at the publisher’s site. Probably thanks to YUIBlog, the book was #7#6 in the JavaScript category on Amazon today, not bad. It’s the highest I’ve seen it, not that I’m obsessed with checking sales rank. It’s the journey, […]
php|works and pyWorks
I’ll be speaking at the php|works and pyWorks conferences in Atlanta, Georgia in November, they’ll be held together and there is a central track that has topics of interest to both phpiers and pythonistas, this is where I come in. The conference(s) schedule is here and this is me: “Image optimization for the web”
Installing pngcrush at dreamhost
pngcrush is an excellent optimizer for png images, simple and fast, highly recommended. Basically any time before you post a PNG on the web, you should run it through PNGCrush. It’s a command line utility, there’s a quick way to integrate pngcrush in windows explorer. (note to self: I actually wrote a wordpress plugin to […]
At the (Java)Ranch this week
There’s a book promotion event this week at the JavaRanch’s HTML and JavaScript forum, ranchers are asking all kinds of interesting questions about my OOJS book. There will be a free book giveaway at the end of the week, so come in and join the fun. Yesterday my post count got from 0 to 15 […]
Vote for my SXSW 2009 panel
Stuart Colville has put up a proposal for the South By Southwest Interactive 2009 conference, or SXSWi 2009 for short. This is a panel with me and Nicole from Yahoo!’s performance team and Stuart and Ed (ex-UK-Yahoo!s, currently in GCAP Media). In Stuart’s own words: … a panel on practical performance techniques featuring Stoyan Stefanov […]
Advertising and privacy
We now have an option to opt-out of advertising cookies that track your behaviour: Google’s opt out page Yahoo’s
ppt to pdf to slideshare via imagemagick
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 […]
Today’s mail: a box full of … my book!
Finally! The wait is over! After people have already managed to read the book, the chef d’oeuvre that is my Object-Oriented Javascript and some have published 5 star reviews on Amazon, the author finally gets his copies. Oh, happy day! 15 copies, yeey. I don’t get to keep them all, because 10 are for my […]
