I’ve been a big fan of the Pragmatic Bookshelf series, in particular their monthly online magazine. The magazine are downloadable in PDF, .mobi, and .epub formats, and browsable online in HTML format. Browsing through the latest couple of issues, I noticed a distinct slowness as some of the images were downloaded. This is usually a hint that a high resolution image is being referenced, but being “cropped” down to a smaller size with the height/width attributes in the HTML. For example, see this story about Ruby Bundler and look at the red ribbon image. The source image is 693×693 but…
After my team launched a new site design and blog system for the [Yahoo! Developer Network][ydn], I decided to review the performance of this site to see where it could be improved. In summary, after removing one performance-hogging widget (Lijit search widget) and following recommendations from YSlow and Page Speed, the site should be running much faster now.