Postbureaucrat

Personal blogging by Steph Gray, former digital agency founder and erstwhile bureaucrat

24tips: how to make yours smaller

12 Dec: Size matters. And small is most definitely beautiful online. Here’s a tiny collection of tools to help you shrink things.

reduced size PDF

  • 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

24 helpful tools and techniques for doing web stuff cheaply

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