tl;dr: You can stop worrying and URL-encode only the # character. What? So you want to have an SVG image in a CSS stylesheet. Yup, using data URIs (hey lookie, a 2009 post). There are a number of reasons not to embed images in CSS to begin with (caching, reuse), but hey, sometimes you’re not […]

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 […]

This is one of those note-to-self type of posts. Just went through the exercise of installing a number of PNG tools on the Mac and here are some notes. The instructions below should probably work on any unix box. AdvDef, AdvPng, … There is a number of Adv* tools (advdef, advpng, advmng, advzip) packed together […]

I’m back from the most excellent JSConf (JavaScript Conference) in Washington D.C. I’m tired and need sleep but the conference was, hands down, the best conference I’ve ever attended. It was all about the community, it was inexpensive, with parties all around, both speakers and attendees were treated exceptionally well, in fact there wasn’t a […]

If you follow this blog you already know the infamous website performance rule #1 – reduce the number of HTTP requests. Actually, to celebrate Earth Day and to jump the “go-green” wagon/jargon, my favourite performance mantra as of late is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” (the Recycle part is a wee fuzzy but, oh well) So to […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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”

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 […]