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Re: The 512 Club
Destry wrote #327686:
Is there another reputable place to test page weight that is not a goog product?
+1 for Pingdom Tools (though watch out, they were bought by SolarWinds a while back and I’m not sure how quickly SW will need to raise some money given recent events). And don’t forget browser inspectors, they’re handy.
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Re: The 512 Club
#100DaysToOffload is another project from the same person, Kev Quirk. This one is to inspire people to write more. The NaNo WriMo for bloggers, I guess, except you get a full year.
Quirk and these two sites are listed in the 512 list. Maybe there’s even one or two more of his tucked in there. He knows how to market himself, but it does seem to offer positive benefits to web culture that harken back to the good ol’ days of 1997. Here’s his Masto, the only socmed account he has, I think. He works in infosec.
Back to The Club… the last entry, blue section, is a Txp site, ebass.uk. A woodworker who makes base guitars and uses Txp. 👍
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Re: The 512 Club
Destry wrote #327717:
*Back to The Club*… the last entry, blue section, is a Txp site, ebass.uk. A woodworker who makes base guitars and uses Txp. 👍
I know who that is…
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Re: The 512 Club
There are lots of good sites on 512kb.club, I haven’t seen a dodgy one yet. Most are techie and so Textpattern would not be out of place. Is it a bad SEO neighbourhood in some way? I don’t know, I don’t think so, but I am still learning.
Dozy P My attempt at music
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Re: The 512 Club
gaekwad wrote #327692:
+1 for Pingdom Tools (though watch out, they were bought by SolarWinds a while back and I’m not sure how quickly SW will need to raise some money given recent events). And don’t forget browser inspectors, they’re handy.
Yes, watch out
Dozy P My attempt at music
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Re: The 512 Club
Run with FF on macOS:
| Pingdom | GT Metrix | |
|---|---|---|
| Test server location | Frankfurt | Vancouver B.C |
| Load time (s) | 0.33 | 1.6 |
| Total measured weight (KB) | 120.4 | 115 |
| Fonts weight (KB) | 76.4 | 73.8 |
| Delta | 44 | 41.2 |
Seems I can get the green ticket if I drop my fonts… But, I actually like my fonts. ;)
I notice Tor browser (my end-user choice) doesn’t recognize the fonts anyway. Maybe I should run the test again using Tor.
In both cases I get an ‘A’ grade, with some suggestions between them:
- Cache assets (expires headers?)
- gZip compress assets
- Use nextgen image formats (e.g. WebP)
I wasn’t aware of the new image formats, and I just now notice Pixelmator (what I’ve used for a long time) has an export option for that tucked away in the ‘More…’ closet that I never looked in before.
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Re: The 512 Club
WebP is still not universally supported, the issue being Safari which only recently gained support (and then only in latest macOS releases). Creating fallbacks is annoying and time consuming.
There are tools to convert JPEG to WebP server-side depending on users browser but I haven’t used those for a few years – so can’t vouch for them or recommend them personally.
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Re: The 512 Club
Also, please see here
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Re: The 512 Club
WebP with a fallback to PNG or JPG is used increasingly these days.
You can easily and losslessly save 17KB on ladder.png if you run it through ImageOptim (or similar), or let me know the best email address for you and I’ll email it over.

(And yes, for anyone asking, I did run the ImageOptim GUI screenshot through ImageOptim.)
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Re: The 512 Club
I started another thread (you’ll see it) on WebP before seeing the above. :/
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Re: The 512 Club
I wasn’t asking but just discovered there’s an ImageOptim for Linux (but costs money) and also this free online service which I will try. It doesn’t offer as much control as Squoosh which was used for images here.
I found that for very fine-grained images (especially those with fine grain background), webp images are larger that jpg to get the same quality. otherwise subtle lines and details are smoothed into blandness. But for most images (and for those with a plain background) webp is the way to go (at 84% compression in my case to achieve results comparable with 80% jpg compression).
Dozy P My attempt at music
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Re: The 512 Club
I can also recommend XnConvert if you want a capable, freeware-for-personal-or-educational-use image processor.
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Re: The 512 Club
gaekwad wrote #327692:
+1 for Pingdom Tools (though watch out, they were bought by SolarWinds a while back[…]
I hadn’t visited that site in ages and was quite amused to see the SolarWinds logo “proudly” displayed.
More seriously, take care with (many) of those online tools, as they often use the older Google scripts (from back when “search console” was called “developper (something… which I forgot)1”. The GT Metrix site linked upthread by Destry relies on the more recent LightHouse scripts – more reliable and accurate.
The older script stubbornly and constantly always complain that I should “compress my assets”, and it always boils down to fonts not being gzipped… No silly dummy woff and even more woff2 are compressed formats.
Use the Browser provided developper tools, tells you a lot. The current version of Chromium/Blink based browser include Lighthouse.
1 Old age… holes
Last edited by phiw13 (2020-12-22 08:44:04)
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
phiw13 on Codeberg
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Re: The 512 Club
Just out of curiosity I have just submitted Textpattern.com to the 521KB Club – as the homepage (the heaviest page of the whole site) is now 463KB uncompressed due to some extensive performance work I’ve just done on it (and Pete’s solid server scaffold). GTmetrix results snapshot.
IMO any exposure is good, though I take previous comments in this thread into account.
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