invisible 'banner bloat' (cogs)

rainforest1155

I just checked my site with this tool and was a bit suprised that the biggest image wasn't my banner, but those cogs. 23kb added to the front page without being even displayed is way too much - that's ~ one fourth (~25%!) of the size of my frontpage! Many dial-up users will probably never see the cogs anyways because of the load time of the front page, which is to a good chunk because of the cogs.

My first suggestion is to not include them on the frontpage at all.
Secondly - who needs 255 colors in a BW-animations anyways? Have a look what the nice tool I mentioned earlier makes out of this big animation and the cogs itself still look ok with 3 colors (it's only 8kb big)! Keep in mind that this was just a quick downsample by the tool - a graphics artist probably can do much better!

Thanks,
Sebastian

Andy

rainforest1155 wrote:

I just checked my site with this tool and was a bit suprised that the biggest image wasn't my banner, but those cogs. 23kb added to the front page without being even displayed is way too much - that's ~ one fourth (~25%!) of the size of my frontpage! Many dial-up users will probably never see the cogs anyways because of the load time of the front page, which is to a good chunk because of the cogs.

My first suggestion is to not include them on the frontpage at all.
Secondly - who needs 255 colors in a BW-animations anyways? Have a look what the nice tool I mentioned earlier makes out of this big animation and the cogs itself still look ok with 3 colors (it's only 8kb big)! Keep in mind that this was just a quick downsample by the tool - a graphics artist probably can do much better!

Thanks,
Sebastian

And where does is show that you are loading LB Gears? Thanks... What page did you run the report on? Homepage? A gallery page with /Original? Please reply with the link of pages you ran report on, thanks Sebastian...

Andy

Andy

PS: Thanks for the suggestion, as always, Sebastian!

Mike Lane

Check out the page's html source:

<div id="lightBoxStage" style="display: none;">

The lightbox and everything associated with it will not load until the user takes an action to make it load. So there's no problem with it being on your page.

rainforest1155

Mike Lane wrote:

Check out the page's html source:

<div id="lightBoxStage" style="display: none;">

The lightbox and everything associated with it will not load until the user takes an action to make it load. So there's no problem with it being on your page.

Thanks, maybe that's the way it should be, but I just did the test with an empty cache in IE6 on my frontpage. I didn't click any links and still I find a cogs.gif in my Temporary Internet Files with the exact timestamp of when I hit my frontpage. It did get loaded in IE6!
I tried the same in FIrefox 1.07 - just loading the frontpage resulted in having the cogs.gif on the harddrive!

Any idea why this gets loaded even though it isn't displayed and shouldn't be loaded at that point?

Thanks,
Sebastian

{JT}

I already took care of the cog size, just waiting for it to go out with some other things. Down to 6.6kb now

rainforest1155 wrote:

Thanks, maybe that's the way it should be, but I just did the test with an empty cache in IE6 on my frontpage. I didn't click any links and still I find a cogs.gif in my Temporary Internet Files with the exact timestamp of when I hit my frontpage. It did get loaded in IE6!
I tried the same in FIrefox 1.07 - just loading the frontpage resulted in having the cogs.gif on the harddrive!

Any idea why this gets loaded even though it isn't displayed and shouldn't be loaded at that point?

Thanks,
Sebastian

rainforest1155

{JT} wrote:

I already took care of the cog size, just waiting for it to go out with some other things. Down to 6.6kb now

Wow, that was fast and sounds very good indeed - thanks JT!

Sebastian

EDIT: Still wondering why it gets loaded on the homepage though?!

georges

Cogs and the Blackberry
Hi JT -

I know the Blackberry isn't really one of the trageted devices, but before the last update it would work "ok" with the home page and journal style pages.

Now it somewhat works, but the first thing you get on any page is the gears. Once you scroll down, the rest is still ok.

Again, not a complaint, just more of a comment on a casual use. I know the blackberry is a screwy device from the programmers standpoint. It was just handy to show someone a photo.

See you later, gs
http://georgesphotos.net

{JT}

this will also be addressed in the next update.

georges wrote:

Hi JT -

I know the Blackberry isn't really one of the trageted devices, but before the last update it would work "ok" with the home page and journal style pages.

Now it somewhat works, but the first thing you get on any page is the gears. Once you scroll down, the rest is still ok.

Again, not a complaint, just more of a comment on a casual use. I know the blackberry is a screwy device from the programmers standpoint. It was just handy to show someone a photo.

See you later, gs
http://georgesphotos.net