Tag Archives: Usenet

All the Site in … One Request

Is it possible?

Yes it is! Actually I stumbled these days on a video where one of the guys talked about a quite interesting technique, that all the site was sent in one response from the server. But how is it possible? Actually everything is collected on the server side, i.e. with PHP which groups everything within a string. Obviously the images are base64ed. Than everything is send to the client with appropriate delimiters and mime types, and the client separates the string and build ups the page.

Problems

Of course there are some problems. First of all, as you may guess, MSIE doesn’t support base64. Another bad thing is that this isn’t cacheable.

One Good Use

There is however a good place to use this technique. In mobile versions. There is no much need of caches and most of all MSIE is not there!

Optimizing the web. Start with the images!

Common question when speaking about web site optimization is: where should I start. As I mentioned before almost every technology used in the building of a web project can be improved. The bad news is that this improvement needs effort and when it comes to changing some code that’s already written that’s bad. The good news, as it exists, is that in the most cases most of the traffic of a site comes by images and/or other media and their optimization doesn’t have to deal with coding and can simply be optimized.

Optimize every image

The first thing that you can do to improve your site image is to optimize them. Sometimes the files you put on the site as they are JPEG, GIF and PNGs can be improved just by using some software that strips useless information from their headers and using various algorithms to smooth the similar pixels. As you may know in the case of PNG and GIF this is particularly natural. Stoyan Stefanov a lead Yahoo! developer is know as guru when it comes image optimization. You can check more detailed information about software and tools on his blog here. The reality is that you don’t need extra info into the images, as useless information about the camera, which is often setup into the image header, and when it comes to the web that’s really good. In fact according to some researches this can spend you more than 30% of traffic. Continue reading Optimizing the web. Start with the images!