If you’re like me you probably have a small or not-so-small collection of computer stuff most of which is obsolete, broken or both. Well now it’s possible to clean out your closet and get some cash for it as well. If you help your friends and neighbors get rid of their old computer junk it could become a significant amount of cash thanks to cash for electronic scrap.
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I just found a problem with IE9 in how it handles the load event for img tags. With IE8 and earlier if I wanted to perform some JS function after an image loaded I could do something like this:
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If the below image has “webp” in the corner your browser can display WebP. If it has “jpeg” it is because your browser cannot show WebP images but the user experience remains the same. webp is a new image format pioneered by Google based on the VP8 video codec to reduce the download size of images on the web. What I am presenting is a way to offer WebP images to browsers that support them while falling back to jpegs so that visitors still have the same user experience.
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I’m always surprised how hard it is to install standard open source packages on OS X and X11 is no different. Installing it on 10.4 is virtually impossible without the original installation DVD which I never have handy. I got this from James Martin but thought it needed an extra mirror because it was painfully slow downloading it from there. Here it is for your convenience.
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Eshop is a nice ecommerce plugin for WordPress but it does not support taking credit card information directly on the site but redirects the customer to Authorize.net site or Paypal or some other payment processor. I had a need to accept cards without redirecting the customer to a external site so I wrote a patch for Eshop. Download patch here
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Now that font embedding is supported in all major browsers it has become increasingly common thanks to the bulletproof embedding technique. However embedded fonts can add several milliseconds if not whole seconds and can even block rendering if not done correctly. Here you will find how to mitigate the performance implications if not eliminate them completely.
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I am daring to claim that I have found the best bulletproof way to create css3 background gradients. It is the best because it guarantees that extra http requests are not made unless needed and bulletproof because it works in every browser falling back to a normal background-image based gradient if necessary.
UPDATE: Added new rules for IE10 and Opera 11.10!
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Last month the developers of Scriptaculous blessed us with a new released based on Prototype 1.7 so I thought we should see how well it minified. Nobody else seems to be providing minified versions so I thought I would make a few of my own. I used the YUI Compressor and Google’s new Closure Compiler. I tried Dean Edwards packer but the resulting code gave parse errors. Google closure compile in advanced mode didn’t work either but the simple optimization seem to be working and the result is smaller than with the YUI compressor. I’ve run a few of the functional tests in scriptaculous and they worked fine. Both tools claim to be 100% safe but be sure to test everything.
There are many things that make a webpage load quickly and the most difficult of which is serving static content from a content delivery network or CDN. There are two free CDN that I know of. Read More