Fixing bloated web pages manton.org
@cm This is really nice to see (also looks like a great conference). I recently watched a talk (which I don't seem able to find at the moment) where one of the leads behing PHP talked about a major focus in refactoring and improving PHP7 and beyond is to increase energy efficiency for exactly these reasons.
@cm Framing it around sustainability makes sense to me. So many web pages now are just wasteful: to both our time and computing resources.
@manton My move to Firefox was odd timing, considering this has just come up (again). Hopefully Mozilla continues to press hard on their messages around an open, sustainable web; giving everybody an alternative option when it comes to web browsing is only a good thing.
I knew the web initially mostly from message boards and the number of "runs best on X browser" messages are burned into my mind. Seems like we're headed that way again, an inevitable progression considering how much power Google has consolidated as both vendor and provider.
@manton This post and other conversations here are making me rethink my own blogging practices. I've taken pride in offering big, gorgeous photos (and I profit more than I would ever have expected to from well-placed, unobtruisive ads in sidebars), but I'm realizing that I've been posting less because of all the overhead now associated with my process. The idea of a fast, simple site really appeals to me.
@manton Funnily enough, I was looking at the performance of micro.blog hosted sites just yesterday. While this is a good start, there’s plenty of room for improvement, with caching of static assets being high on the list. www.webpagetest.org/result/18...
@paulrobertlloyd Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I actually don't want to use a CDN because I think all the photos you upload should be at your own domain name. (The only exception is the profile photo, which is served from Micro.blog and actually could be faster.)
@markmcelroy Yeah, making it as simple as possible to post is definitely one of the goals with Micro.blog. If blogging is easier, more people will do it.
@manton @paulrobertlloyd a CDN isn't needed to meet many of these improvements. Most of the caching needes could be met with .htaccess rules. I don't use a CDN on my site, by have all the images configured to cache (granted, that means folks visiting my site get to cache a bunch of images...since I post a lot of images 🤷)
@manton Agreed – although it might be possible to use a CDN behind the scenes while also respecting custom domains. Compression and caching are certainly worth investigating however; pretty much the first performance dial to turn when optimising a website. By means of comparison, here is a report for a post on my site: www.webpagetest.org/result/18...
@eli @paulrobertlloyd The browser will do some basic caching of most of the photos. The biggest hit is the profile photo which takes a couple round-trips through my servers. But it's kind of theoretical because my site loads in 200 ms already.
@manton on a similar note I’ve noticed that profile photos are broken for me when I view folks’ hosted sites. Is this a known issue? I’d be happy to do more digging if that would be helpful.
@manton It will, but without a max-age or expires value, revisting the site will see the same asset get downloaded again – behaviour I’ve noticed on the micro.blog timeline too, in fact.
@paulrobertlloyd People can always use Cloudflare with Micro.blog too if they want it. I care more about the real-world performance than what a report might suggest... Compressing a file that is only 5 KB isn't going to help. (I would like to make profile photos faster and cached, though.)
@manton I did a little bit of digging -- it looks like Privacy badger was the culprit. Turning it off solved the issue. Interesting that it only inteferes with micro.blog user icons when served to a hosted blog. No problem anywhere else, nor with any other images.