12 Dec: Size matters. And small is most definitely beautiful online. Here’s a tiny collection of tools to help you shrink things.
- Yahoo’s Smush.it takes an image file and applies various compression techniques to it, and lets you download a ‘smushed’ version, often quite a bit smaller. A good way to shrink commonly used graphics on your site, or a big banner that’s slowing a page load down
- CSScompressor strips whitespace and superfluous declarations from your CSS file, making it tiny. Useful, but less readable for the person who has to maintain the code afterwards, of course – CodeBeautifier can help with that
- JScompress does the same to Javascript code… and JSbeautifier can turn it back into neatly indented code again if you need that
- On the Mac, generating PDFs is a cinch, but image-rich PowerPoints can bounce back from those strict government email gateways. Try using the Preview app’s Save feature to export a reduced file size (from the Quartz filter menu). If that compresses your nice photos too much, try this neat trick to roll your own compression filter
