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!
IP Address - allows one to see one’s own IP address (outside one’s NAT firewall, of course) with one pageload. (You can link to it for free, or contact us to link to a custom ad-free version of the tool.)
Hostname - based on the IP tool above, goes further to perform a reverse DNS lookup on the user’s IP to display the IP address as well as the corresponding hostname. (Reverse DNS does not always work as expected, however, when one computer is identified by several hostnames.) (You may only link to this tool if you have our approval, as it consumes system resources and bandwidth.)
Media Conversion - utilizing a partner account with Media-Convert, this is the first tool we have utilizing an external service. The Media Conversion tool recognizes many audio and video formats, including WMV, FLV, MOV, MP4, MP3, RM, DV, and AVI, and can output in even more formats. It’s an excellent way to convert your media file from one thing to anything else. (Note: file-size limit of 150 MB.)
These tools are designed with the same interface as that used on our Geekie.org blog, so we feel that users can become familiar with the layout. We maintain a consistent appearance for the optimal experience.
In the near future, we will once again add Google-powered search to this site, with results on a page of similar layout.
On another matter, we are planning on developing FArticles.info into a content site for articles on various subjects. We’d like to install a PHP/MySQL content management system, but are undecided on which one to use. (If Joomla! 1.5 were released, I would have no doubts.)
Vote on this matter, and choose from our options or type in your own.
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