Alex Harries's diary

The new homepage is covered in spanky-new graphics. It's got loads more content. It has a tonne more .CSS than the old one.

And yet it's only 500 bytes larger in size.

That makes me just a tiny bit happy. It was also entirely accidental. Now, hands up if you care. ... Anyone? No? Dust? Anyone...?

It was pointed out a couple of days ago that we might be somewhat over-doing it with the amount of comments in our code, especially in our CSS files. I didn't realise just how much until I ran a little test using our new-fangled dynamic CSS thingy; comments make up around 16Kb in the 65Kb of css sent down for the homepage alone.

For a broadband user, that's a whole... one-third of a second to download. Ahh well, at least we're heading in the right direction ;o)

Because of this, we're trialling not sending any comments down, but this means if in the future we decide to use CSS hacks which make use of comment tags to hide code from non-compliant browsers, we're going to run into a whole world of CSS validation fun...

Another trick we're trying is sending the .css files in a compressed format - it's (supposed to be) completely transparent to the person browsing the website; our server asks your browser if it can handle compressed information, and either your browser can or can't - if it can't, the stylesheet is simply sent uncompressed, but if it can then the server packages the css file up on-the-fly and sends it down the wires to your browser, where it's decoded.

Despite the minimal benefit, it's still good that we're paying attention to these things, although I'm fairly certain there are many much more important things to be getting on with. Like answering the support emails I've been hoarding for far too long - oops!

/al - off to do some proper work now

One thing that really bugged me about the way this site runs is that, whenever you use the "back" button in your browser, the page re-loads. This isn't a standard thing - if you go to, say BBC.co.uk and click a link at the bottom of the homepage, then use the back button to go back to the homepage, you'll still be at the bottom of the page and you won't have to wait for it to reload. On UPSU.net, every time you visit a page it re-loads; this is great for making sure you see the latest version of a page, e.g. the homepage or the forums, but it's terrible for our bandwidth and your page load times.

Because one of the main things I'm aiming for with UPSU.net is to make it as fast as possible to navigate around, I've decided to try turning off the code which tells your browser to reload the page each time you visit it.

Another thing we've added is the "sign in" box in the navigation bar of every page; now, if you need to sign in to the site, you can find a username and password box at the top of the page. Fill them in and click "sign in" and you're automagically signed into the site. At the moment, you're also returned to the page you were just browsing, but I think it will be better to send people to their profile homepage since this is where you can look after your account; I've been trying things out the former way for the past few days, and I'll be deciding later whether to try it using the latter method for a while to see if it's a better way of moving people around the site.

As always, I can't test each page on every type of browser, so your feedback is always welcome - just add your comments below as normal - if this post is greeted with the eternal sound of tumbleweed rolling across the comments box, I'll assume that everything's gone to plan and no-one's suddenly found UPSU.net isn't working for them anymore... ;o)