Everest with Anvil: css

Showing posts with label css. Show all posts

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.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Nice set of instructions for speeding up your web pages

Today I was testing my site and I realized that one of the CDNs I was using was hanging. Not wanting my website to be at the mercy of more failure points than necessary, I brought the hosted jQuery and Bootstrap files in house.

The result was a surprise: good speed on Chrome but slow on Firefox.

Anyway, I found a nice resource on speeding up a web page with at lot of details that I hadn't learned before:

http://www.sitepoint.com/complete-guide-reducing-page-weight/

One interesting thing is that browsers have a limit for how many web requests they will make to one server at a time. It's possible that it was this that made the difference between page load times on Firefox and Chrome. It's a good argument for compiling all your CSS and JS together into one file each per page.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Web widget tutorial

alexmarandon.com/articles/web_widget_jquery/

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Javascript library for aligning decimal points in a table

Apparently this is a bit of a trick in html, but here's a library if you have a table with columns:

https://github.com/ndp/align-column

Now if you don't have a table . . .

Thursday, November 20, 2014

bootstrap

http://getbootstrap.com/css/

Monday, November 17, 2014

Make css work the same across all browsers

Link the following stylesheet to keep CSS the same across all browsers:

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" src="normalize-css.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/normalize.css">

Thanks Udacity.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Chrome developer tool saving

Nice video on a powerful tool. Most importantly, it shows you how to save the changes that you make.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8SS-rUEZPg

Also, see

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6843495/how-to-save-css-changes-of-styles-panel-of-chrome-developer-tools