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Optimize Website Load Time | Compression Tools and Techniques

While making websites we often consider using a lot of scripts and styles in order to increase interactivity and make the website richer. As a result, we end up with slow website, while you can of course remove those scripts and styles to make it load faster Or you can make is load faster without removing any functionality by doing some easy tricks.

Compressing JavaScript

While compressing JavaScript is most recommended and has a great impact in website load time(Generally they are already compressed for many jQuery plugins). There are many tools and methods using which you can compress JavaScript, few most common tools are Yahoo’s YUI Compressor, Dean Edwards’ Packer, Douglas Crockford’s JSMin, Dojo ShrinkSafe and gzip or htaccess(explained later), these things may be sounding strange, but using them is very easy. These JavaScript minification tools preserve all the features of the JavaScript code, but reduce the code size by compressing them. There is no ‘best’ JavaScript compressor, each one of them have  their plus and minus, but you can always compare between the compressors at http://compressorrater.thruhere.net/, its really a nice tool.

Compressing CSS

CSS compressing is also a good technique to optimize website’s load time, there are many CSS minification tools too. Here is a great article on Design Shack for CSS Minification, you should definitely head over: 18 CSS Compression Tools and Techniques and one more at Cats Who Code which explains how you can do it just by PHP: 3 ways to compress CSS files using PHP.

gzip and htaccess

Understanding simply, if you use gzip or htaccess compression, what happens is your website files gets compressed, and the compressed files are send over to the web browser, and the web browser extracts it and shows it to the users. It reduces response time by reducing the size of the HTTP response, this trick is definitely beneficial. There are many tutorials for gzip compression, a good one is at Samuel Santos’ blog: Improving web performance with Apache and htaccess.

Compressor Tools

There are many websites where you can compress your code, here I am including some of the noteworthy ones.

CSS Drive Gallery- CSS Compressor


CSS Drive Gallery CSS Compressor

Compressor.Ebiene.de


Compress javascript and css. Amazing code compression. Quick easy and free

/packer/


packer

Javascript Compressor


Javascript Compressor compress code online for free

CSS Compressor


CSS Compressor Online code compressor for Cascading Style Sheets

Minify/Pack Javascript Online


Minify Javascript Online Online JavaScript Packer

Online YUI Compressor


Online YUI Compressor

Performance Tools

There are few extensions/add-ons too using which you can check the performance of your website and suggests ways to improve the performance. One of them is YSlow by Yahoo, it has a Firefox Add-on as well as a Chrome Extension. There is one more web based tool Page Speed Online hosted at Google Labs, which is equally good. There is also a simple gzip test tool: GIDZipTest.

Conclusion

Our website’s performance is an important factor, and one of the main things in it is the website load time, if our websites are slow, there are chances that user won’t return. Also, these compression techniques are easily doable by editing the .htaccess file or by adding simple snippets using php or using those web based tools. Thus, you should definitely consider doing these tricks.

 

Sending HTML Emails using your Web-based Email account | Gmail | Yahoo | Hotmail

Yes, you can send your custom made HTML Email using your Web-based Email account account like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. Many people think HTML can only be send using Email Clients like Outlook or Thunderbird, etc. To send an HTML using your Web-based Email account, you need to do make a valid HTML Email Template first, like with in-line CSS, using Tables, absolute paths etc. Read here how to write an HTML Email. After you are done making it, upload it to your server or if you dont have one you can use a free web hosting service here or any other which you like. Make sure your HTML Email has absolute paths for everything, your readers are going to be at all different locations.

When done, open your Web-based Email account, click on Compose/New Mail, make sure you have Rich Formatting enabled. Also, open your HTML Email using your Web Browser. Select all on the HTML Email page using Ctrl+A(On Windows) Or Command-A(On Mac) and then paste it on your Rich Text Editor(where you are writing the Email) using Ctrl+V(On Windows) or Command-V(On Mac). Send it. Thats its. So easy to do.

Make sure HTML Email is properly formatted, be careful with it. CSS rules vary for Web-based emails, also it is not necessary that the receivers Email Client has HTML support it, it will go as plain text in that case, and if they are not web code friendly, they might just delete it in one go thinking it as some spam. Thus, you should give the receiver the opportunity to choose between HTML Email or plain text. Also if it is a commercial Email, make sure it follows CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Flickr vs Picasa Web Albums

What if your digital camera is full of Pictures and you want to share with friends and relatives, Of course you wont mail them. You will probably like upload it somewhere and share.
There are 2 major 800 pound gorillas for photos sharing in Web. Yahoo’s Flickr and Picasa Web Albums by Google.

Flickr

Flickr is a well known in the photo sharing market and is owned by Yahoo. It has a good interface, it’s polished, works well, and is indeed addictive. But Flickr has some limitations Flickr offers 100 MB of free storage each calendar month but the storage counter is reset every month so you get virtually unlimited space on Flickr without spending a penny. (100 MB is good for storing upto 120 picture of average size). New pictures can be uploaded to Flickr via mobile phones, desktop software, email attachments or through the web-based interface available on Flickr website. Pictures can then be grouped in sets (like “Conference in New York”) as well as tags (like “conference”). You can upgrade to Pro for making the number of photos unlimited for each month but even after you upgrade to Pro, you’ll bump up against more limitations if your JPG files are over 10MB each, which happens quite often when you shoot with a late-model DSLR and upload at full resolution with the intention of printing that photo in a large size. Use Flickr if you want to engage actively within the big and friendly Flickr user community, get comments on your photos, join groups and submit photos to them — in short, partake fully of the social community of photo sharing.

Picasa Web Albums


This is the photo sharing client owned by Web Giant Google, This was made to enable Google Image Organization Software Picasa user’s to share there photos online. One can create private and public albums there and order prints. This is the best option for Photo sharing for a regular person but the storage is limited(Disadvantage over Flickr) it has a 1 GB storage and then Paid storage of 7Gb for $25 a year, You can come over this just by resizing the images rather than uploading the full High Resolution Pics. The default option is to resize only, so that’ll get done automatically. Once you’ve done tell your friends and its done.

Extra Features
For describing the photo, both services let you edit tags and a caption for the image, with Flickr also letting you give each photo a title. Both have a mapping feature letting you set a location for the photo on an interactive map. For the technical data relating to the photo, both services will read and display the EXIF data from a digital camera such as shutter speed, date/time etc. And for viewing a bunch of images, both have a slideshow feature built in. Finally, both services let you specify a name to make a more user friendly URL to give to your friends or family.

Flickr Vs Picasa

Transferring Photos: In Flickr the picture upload thing is very easy but downloading photos from there is difficult, for this you may need to have a 3rd part Flickr App where as in Google’s Picasa Web Albums it comes with an application Picasa. Through Picasa, you can do basic image editing (like crop, rotate, color adjustments, etc) and then upload the edited pictures online. The software can also download photos from the online Picasa albums to your hard-drive without any effort.

Organization: Picasa lets you create as many “albums” as you like to sort your photos into. Flickr lets you have just 3 “sets” to group your photos in, otherwise they all get added to a single “photostream”. For unlimited sets at Flickr you’ll have to go pro.

Storage: Picasa gives you 1GB of storage with the option to buy more (7GB for US$25 per year – shared storage with your Gmail account). Flickr doesn’t state a storage limit, instead they have an upload limit of 100MB per month and limit your “photostream” to the 200 most recent images. The “pro” option at Flickr which will give you unlimited uploads, storage, bandwidth and more.

Cost: Both Flickr and Picasa offer a free service initially, but with limitations on the service at Flickr And a word of warning here, Flickr’s FAQ states “if your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted”. Picasa is better here. You can upgrade to Flickr Pro for $25 and upgarde you 1GB to 7GB in Picasa for $25 a year.