Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

YSlow & Minify…what it did for me…now you

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Yslow is a Firefox addon, I suggest downloading it. It gives you all sorts of cool stats on how your website is performing. Such as, an overall Grade and score, and most importantly, the number of http requests and the total weight of your page.

After downloading Yslow, here was the stats of my home page (http://www.jc-designs.net):

website stats1

Then, I downloaded something called Minify, which you can get here. It is a php script that combines all your css files into one, and all your js files into one. The directions are pretty easy.

Once you have downloaded it, put it on your server in the root directory, and open this url: http://yoursite.com/min/builder/.

You then add all of your css files, in the order you have them in. Be careful here…if you have any @import in your main css file, it will screw it up. Trust me, I found this out before I actually read the line that tells you that. Once you have all the files listed, click on update. It then gives you the html to use to replace the linked css files. Plus a line to add to one of the minifier config files. I know, sounds scary, but on that build page, it tells you exactly what to do. Then you do the same for the js files.

What does all that crap get you? Read on!

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Zen Coding for Aptana….nice little plugin!

Friday, January 15th, 2010

So, I’m finally getting away from Dreamweaver. There is no point to using it anymore anyway, since I never use the design view. Sure it does some things well, and it is for sure the absolute best WYSIWYG editors out there. I’ll use it for some things, but from now on, I’m going with Aptana. Its free and very customizable. I like the way it handles CSS and Javascript. You can create a new project and choose what js libraries you want to include into it. Very cool.

Its not very intuitive, and I’ve had to get a lot of help, but all-in-all, I’m diggin’ it. So, for those that actually already use it, this is for you.

Zen Coding is a nice little plugin with some real crap documentation. I only know how to do a few things with it so far, which I’ll let you know how to do.

First things first….get the plugin here (they have a ton of versions for different frameworks…including Dreamweaver.

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