Sorry for downtime

Sorry for the long unresolved downtime. However, we’re back up, and I’ve moved some of the FreddyWare sites.

For instance, FreddyWare.net has been relocated to the PersonalLog server and has a new and simpler design!

The next post will be tomorrow!

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OpenID enabled again!

It’s been a long time since I last allowed OpenID on this site. In fact, I disabled the OpenID plugin on Christmas Eve 2007. At that time, my reasoning was that the plugin added a great deal of JavaScript and additional CSS to the page. (I had complained that the size of a web page including stylesheets and JavaScript had increased to more than 60 kilobytes.)

It doesn’t seem to be much of a concern now. According to Safari’s Network Timeline tool (under the Develop menu), the homepage is now over 600 kilobytes including stylesheets and JavaScript, and it isn’t slow, even on lesser connection speeds. I’m still trying to optimize the site, but I guess having plugins like WP-PostRatings just add to the size of the site. (I don’t really like Prototype, jquery, and that sort of JavaScript library because they are bulky and require the whole thing to be loaded. The Yahoo! UI is a much better library.) However, to be honest, the biggest file size component is the graphics (screenshots and such), because they go over 300 KB.

Let’s talk about OpenID:

Yahoo! recently embraced OpenID, and the new version of the plugin that I’ve installed now supports using your Flickr page as an OpenID. It’s a nice, simple way of logging in to thousands of sites on the Internet. I have liked this concept for a very long time, and am now re-opening up the OpenID log-in and registration and comment authentication system. I believe that users shouldn’t have to register for all the sites they browse.

Let’s talk more about the site’s size:

Only 5 users over the past month have visited this site on dial-up. Understandably, using the site will be a horrible experience for dial-up users, but 5 users are not significant enough for any concern. I will therefore not aim to optimize the site for dial-up; my goal is to make it an enjoyable experience for users on 256+ kbps connections. The size of the home page (XHTML only) is about 50 KB, and the size of the stylesheets is only 11 KB. What is weighing down this site is the inefficient ITK Ranks scripting system, which has about 10 different complex JavaScript files in an unoptimized format, and the inefficient JavaScript used for ads. OpenID and PostRatings aren’t actually that bad.

To help minimize any pains of surfing our site, I will be optimizing the ad system and showing less banners on the site, opting for PHP rather than JavaScript invocation, and also trying external ad management like Adroll. (I remember taking banners off for a few weeks sometime early in 2007. That worked extremely well.)

A final word: what is really adding to the size of our site is images. I like using graphics to illustrate what I am saying, as opposed to text-only content. Realize, however, that if it weren’t for the images (particularly the resized pictures from Flickr, which is bad at image compression), this site would be only 100 KB, compressed. That’s pretty good for a modern blog. I will try to reduce the amount of resized pictures from Flickr. (The original pictures that I create are a lot smaller than the resized versions.)

Keep browsing our site, subscribe to our feed, submit our articles to your favourite social bookmarking sites (using the links below each post), and rate the posts!

(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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Random Password Generator

I love to innovate and create tools that I feel others would use. In this case, I have created and published a Random Password Generator as part of our many Tech Tools. (Note: the screenshot below does NOT link to the generator, but rather to Flickr.)

I think it’s worth pointing out some features:

A new 8-character random password is generated on every page refresh. This random password will contain a mix of lowercase/uppercase characters and numbers. To generate another one, simply refresh the page or click on “Generate another password”.

You can specify what characters to include, the length of the password(s), and how many passwords you want to generate a list of passwords that can be pasted or used in sequence. By using the bottom part of the page, you can choose those options to generate a list of passwords; see below.

To download this video clip in QuickTime (.mov) format, click here.

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Optimize your Cascading Stylesheets

Geekie.org is making available a clone of Robson’s CSS Compressor using the GPL-licensed source code available at http://iceyboard.no-ip.org/showcode/code/css_compressor.php.

Just so that I didn’t have to go and search the Internet for this excellent CSS compressor every time I wanted to use it, I decided to host the code and frontend on our site. You can find it at http://www.geekie.org/tools/css.compressor. Bookmark it for future use! There are no advertisements on the frontend and the backend works exactly as it was intended to work at the original site.

Previously I talked about a long method of compressing JS or CSS on-the-fly with PHP’s zlib.output_compression. What this tool does isn’t “compress” in the sense of changing the output between the server and your browser, but rather optimize Cascading Stylesheets by changing the way that colours are defined to the shortest form possible, combining different declarations that are similar or identical, and removing useless measurements like 7.00 em. The result can be compressed to as little as 30% of the original code, depending on how it was written.

We recommend that you try this tool, and speed up your site. It’s easy; just copy and paste your CSS into the box and press submit. The default settings work fine for most stylesheets, and help you reduce your filesize significantly. The only downside is that the resulting code won’t be as easy to edit as before, so always keep your original, pre-optimized stylesheet backed up!

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On improving PersonalLog

With the rising demand for blogs on PersonalLog, such as the new blogs started up recently (including A Blog Title and Nikola’s Muzik), I’m starting to see posts on virtually every topic, whether it’s gaming, other sites, life, politics, or music.  All of this means more stress on the infrastructure itself, which is why I’m starting to integrate services like ImageShack and YouTube into the software.

Recently, I’ve enabled PersonalLog-network-wide features, such as ImageShack integration in the Write Post page, easy insertion of videos from the top video sharing sites (including YouTube, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, MyspaceTV, and so on), and added a few optional plugins including NoIE (which shows a warning to Internet Explorer users and helps them move to Firefox), Counterize II (which tracks site visitors and details about them in real time), and a FeedBurner redirection plugin. These and more are being installed, adapted, and perfected every day.

The first two features that I’ve mentioned, ImageShack integration and video embedding, will help people improve their content while not placing any additional burdens on the PersonalLog server. By encouraging people to upload pictures and graphics to ImageShack, I am indirectly causing them to use more graphics, which improves the experience for the visitors. By encouraging and making it easy to embed videos, I am indirectly influencing them to use and incorporate more videos, thus attracting user interaction. At the same time, the videos aren’t hosted on PersonalLog and won’t drive up the bandwidth consumption.

For the ImageShack integration, you can take a look at some screenshots or a video tutorial. For the video embedding, read this post at PersonalLog.

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Background Preferences enabled

The hugely modified edition of the Vistered Little theme that I am using on this site still contains the original code that allowed for the changing of wallpapers. But I’ve disabled the JavaScript-based wallpaper selection that appeared under the blog title in the default theme, and instead forced the users to accept the picture that I set.

But there are those that realize that scrolling isn’t so smooth when there’s a picture in the background.

So I’ve spent some time creating a cookie-based solution called Background Preferences that will let YOU choose what background you want on our site: your choices are limited to black, white, and the picture that I select, but you’re still able to change how the site looks.

The premise of Background Preferences is that users should have a choice… but a limited selection of choices. There’s some complex PHP coding going on in the background that will set cookies & session variables, modify the CSS of the site, and so on, but nevertheless it works. (As far as I know, on Firefox and IE.)

Go try Background Preferences and set your background to a black one. (The second link just does it for you. Specially-formatted links can do that. Don’t try it yourself. It only works on links from Geekie.org.)

Sorry, feed readers. This only works on the site. You can still go to the Background Preferences page from the first two links in this post, but the last link won’t work for you.

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