When I setup this blog back in 2005 I had just graduated from college and most of my development experience at the time was in Java, but I had taken a job as an ASP.NET developer. When I setup the blog I didn’t know that much about web development. Last week Doug Rathbone let me know he was having issues viewing my site. This led me to take a closer look at my blog and I have to say that I’m embarrassed by what I found. I should have made the improvements outlined in this post a long time ago. In the long term I’d like to move off of dasBlog but I haven’t had the time to do that, but I needed to do something. I think I’m in a much better place, and wanted to share what I did. Before that let me recap what problems I discovered.

Poor performance

By far the most egregious aspect of my blog was it poor performance. I was violating every rule in the book! Ok well maybe not every rule as I somehow received a B rating in YSlow. After running YSlow with the Small Site or Blog settings on the site here were the results.

I was making too many http requests which was killing my site. Some of the request were for images in the content but from static content I had the following.

• 11 css files
• 11 JavaScript files
• 1 swf file to facilitate copy to clipboard
• Bunch of small images for styling

Step: Reduce the startup time of the page

My pages were loading slowly, and for the most part un-necessarily. Two things that my site had which were slowing it down were the .js files are imported at the top of the page and un-needed ads showing content. I moved all the .js includes to the bottom of the page which helped the startup time. I also simply removed the ads.

Step: Reduce the number of http request

In total there were 65 requests, not all to my webserver but most of them. The .css files were mostly for the various webparts used by the theme and the generic dasBlog .css files. Many of the .js files were brushes for the syntax highlighter that I use. To take care of this I decided to update the way that my blog looked to avoid the un-necessary images used for styling. After that I removed the un-used .css files from the site template.

Then I downloaded Packer .NET. I used that to compress and combine all the .css files into a single minified .css file for the entire site. I had to update some relative paths in the .css file but other than that it was pretty simple. I also used packer to do the same for the .js files.

Step: Reduce the size of the content being sent

Not only did I want to reduce the number of request going back and forth but I wanted to reduce the overall number of bytes going back and forth. When I was viewing the request going back in forth in my browser I noticed that a lot of .pngs were being sent back and forth because most of my entries have at least 1 image. So I downloaded PNGGauntlet to take care of it. I searched for all .png files in my site and drag tem to PNGGauntlet and let it optimize them for me. After running that I knew that all the images were optimized. I plan to run this tool on all new .png files ever few months. I post my blogs with Windows Live Writer and I haven’t researched if I can integrate this directly into it. I also changed the site’s layout to reduce the content of the web request itself. More on those changes later.

Poor readability

I’m not a designer or a fashion expert but even I could tell that my site was not laid out correctly. It had a lot of elements which were distracting, un-necessary and downright ugly. Below you’ll see thumbnails of how my blog looked like on a hi-res screen and a mid-res screen.

You can see that the left hand column is an offender in both cases equally. The title bar is taking ~10% of the page on the hi-res screen and on the mid-res screen ~35% WTF!!! The most important thing on any blog is the content and the site should be optimized for readers to view the content. Everything else is just a distraction. The column on the left hand side had to go and the title bar needed some serious work. From the content in the sidebar the only items which I liked were; search, link to months, posts on this page and the categories. Everything else pretty much sucked.

Here is what I did; updated the title to be way more compact and less verbose. Removed the sidebar with ads and links. I placed the verbose sidebar content which I did like at the bottom of the page with an anchor. I linked to that in the hearder, which is where I placed the search bar. Now the distracting header is hopefully no longer distracting and the sidebar went away entirely. But all useful functionality and content were preserved.

While doing this I also looked at the HTML content which was being rendered. There were some un-needed

@media only screen and (max-width:600px)
{
    /* Insert css here */
}