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Message # 27690.2

Subject: Membership sites and dial-up?

Date: Mon 26/02/07 09:28:16 GMT

Name: Telcontar

Email: mrnemesis@ntlworld.com

Website:

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Since I'm now working with Liquid Ladies, I am particularly curious about this one.

Right now, when you view a member gallery at Liquid Ladies you start out with a grid of 200x150 thumbnails (or 112x150 for portrait images); clicking each one takes you to a full size image. I chose a random picture from the latest update and it came out at 1280x960. All the images in that update are about 300 k each. I had probably the fastest dial-up on earth and I still imagine that 300 k images would be a real nightmare. Like running through molasses.

I am not sure, then, what you think we should do. I wrote the new gallery generator for Liquid Ladies, so anything that's not terribly convoluted should be able to be introduced. As for other pay sites, you'll have to petition them independently.

A lot of sites use the Gallery gallery program, Squishy Shoes and Tub Queens come to mind. Gallery shows you thumbnails first, followed by a small version of the image, say 640x480. If you click it again, you get the full (original) size. I'm on 4 Mbit, and I'm not the greatest fan of this long-winded approach. However, for dial-up users it must be great: you can get a good look at the medium size, and then make a note of any large ones to grab later when the connection is free. It's also a bandwidth saver for the site itself since if you don't like the look of the image when you enlarge it, you've only eaten say 90 k instead of 300 k.

Would this be a desirable feature at Liquid Ladies? How about at other sites?

In reply to Message (27690)

Increased WWF load/render speed!

By Telcontar - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Sun 25/02/07 23:31:00 GMT

Website:

At the top of the WWF Active Topics page is a grid of ad banners for various sites. Each one is stored on a different server, none of them are pre-scaled and many aren't optimised, period.

Right now, at the bottom, I see these two:

Into the Water dedicated 150x30 banner, 2 k.

Jeans and Pants 468x60 banner -- shrunk by the HTML -- 34 k!

Think about the modem load time for 34 k of data (8 seconds at 4 k/sec) to load a tiny banner that could be as low as 2 k (0.5 sec) if it was scaled and optimised at the source.

Worse, by placing every image on a different server, you can't take any advantage of pipelining or keep-alive. Even requests to ask "has this image changed?" (standard If-Modified-Since conditional GET) require a separate three-way handshake to a new server and can't be chained via keep-alive.

Finally, the browser has to reduce every image to fit into all the slots.

This has to be the slowest-loading site I've ever seen, mostly from waiting for all the HTML to come in, but for people who surf in privacy mode (clear cache on exit), on dial-up etc, you could do a lot to help them by cleaning up the banner situation.

Ideally, you'd host them all on your own site to reduce the number of TCP connections and DNS lookups needed, but even if not, you could still improve it by ensuring that the various sites supply sensible images, scaled and cropped to fit.

The WetInRed site hosted its own copies of all the banners for the Links page, with this same flaw. It came to 500 k of banner images! (Imagine that on a modem ...) From scaling and roughly optimising them all I took 100 k or more off the total. 400 k is still a lot, but these are larger banners on Steve's site -- 468 px wide generally. Personally I prefer plain text for links in the first place, but maybe those on his page need reducing also? With reduced size comes reduced clarity and reduced impact ... Not sure what to do about that one.

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