Friday, January 30, 2015

Minifying and concatenating js and css

I recently read that browsers are limited with regard to the number of requests that they can make to a single server.  That got me thinking about the CSS and JS that I've been grudgingly adding to Nnums.  Some of those pages are definitely requiring more than their share of web requests.

So this morning I've been looking at various options for minifying and concatenating CSS and JS files for deployment. 

As far as I can tell, this is an area where things have been changing very quickly and where there are many interesting options.  But Grunt seems to be fairly middle-of-the road as far as solutions go.  So here's a link to a sort of "Grunt for Dummies" article:

http://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/

Incidentally, this fits my philosophy on learning fairly nicely.  I used to think that rapid learning happened best when you jumped into deep waters quickly.  I jumped into graduate quantum mechanics when I hadn't yet taken undergraduate quantum mechanics, accelerated Latin when I could have taken ordinary Latin, and so on.  I started reading books in Arabic rather than going through all the drills in an undergraduate Arabic class.  That approach can work.  But one of the main things that I've learned is that, while it can work, it isn't the fast way to get on top of a new subject.  The fast way is to start at the very beginning.  And then, yes, gradually push out into those deep waters.  But first get a nice powerful stroke.

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