One way to reduce HTTP requests

CSS Data URI's are a way to encode images directly into CSS. This helps to reduce the number of HTTP requests on your server. For example: Instead of linking to an external resource like a background image, your CSS can have the image available within it. As soon as the CSS is loaded the browser is ready to render the image.

This can have real speed advantages, especially if the browser is configured to limit the number of connections to a host. By freeing up a connection you can improve your rendering time.

Another advantage is that if you are serving across a secure connection then all of your page elements can originate from the same, secure site, and not generate those annoying warnings to your visitors that some elements are not secure.

More information on CSS data URI is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

Spritebaker (http://http://www.spritebaker.com/) offers a free web-service. They will take your CSS and parse it for content, then return to you the newly encoded CSS file.

Of course the size of your CSS will increase because it now contains extra data. Implementing server side compression can help reduce the impact of this bloat. Spritebaker offers some advice on enabling mod_gzip on Apache and this tutorial is useful background reading.

And if you're using IIS then you don't need to worry about compression. People should buy faster computers and get more expensive internet connections to support your Microsoft habit.

Comments

Solving Doctrine - A new entity was found through the relationship

There are so many different problems that people have with the Doctrine error message: exception 'Doctrine\ORM\ORMInvalidArgumentException' with message 'A new entity was found through the relationship 'App\Lib\Domain\Datalayer\UnicodeLookups#lookupStatus' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Searching through the various online sources was a bit of a nightmare. The best documentation I found was at http://www.krueckeberg.org/ where there were a number of clearly explained examples of various associations. More useful information about association ownership was in the Doctrine manual , but I found a more succinct explanation in the answer to this question on StackOverflow . Now I understood better about associations and ownership and was able to identify exactly what sort I was using and the syntax that was required. I was implementing a uni-directional many to one relationship, which is supposedly one of the most simpl...

Grokking PHP monolog context into Elastic

An indexed and searchable centralized log is one of those tools that once you've had it you'll wonder how you managed without it. I've experienced a couple of advantages to using a central log - debugging, monitoring performance, and catching unknown problems. Debugging Debugging becomes easier because instead of poking around grepping text logs on servers you're able to use a GUI to contrast and compare values between different time ranges. A ticket will often include sparse information about the problem and observed error, but if you know more or less when a problem occurred then you can check the logs of all your systems at that time. Problem behaviour in your application can occur as a result of the services you depend on. A database fault will produce errors in your application, for example. If you log your database errors and your application errors in the same central platform then it's much more convenient to compare behaviour between...

Translating a bit of the idea behind domain driven design into code architecture

I've often participated in arguments discussions about whether thin models or thin controllers should be preferred. The wisdom of a thin controller is that if you need to test your controller in isolation then you need to stub the dependencies of your request and response. It also violates the single responsibility principal because the controller could have multiple reasons to change. Seemingly, the alternative is to settle on having fat models. This results in having domain logic right next to your persistence logic. If you ever want to change your persistence layer you're going to be in for a painful time. That's a bit of a cargo cult argument because honestly who does that, but it's also a violation of the single responsibility principal. One way to decouple your domain logic from both persistence and controller is to use the "repository pattern". Here we encapsulate domain logic into a data service. This layer deals exclusively with imple...

Adventures in IT

Search This Blog