Behind the scenes, the LGF Blog Engine code is being radically reworked, especially in pages with comments. By optimizing the HTML/Javascript/CSS design, we’ve managed to reduce the size (defined as the amount of HTML code it takes to render the comment in your browser) of each individual comment by about half.

Half, I say. Half.

This is a very good thing, because until we implement Ajax pagination of comments (on the drawing board), reducing the size of each comment is the best way to reduce the size of the entire page. In a page with a thousand comments, saving 10 bytes per comment results in a 10K savings on the size of the page. (And these changes have saved a lot more than 10 bytes per comment.)

Most of the trimming took place in the various elements that make up the top line of each comment, what Stinky and I call the “meta” line; the line that contains the icon and name of the user who posted it, the time and date, and all those little icons for rating, favoriting, reporting, etc. There was a lot of duplicated functionality in that meta line, and it’s all stripped down now.

The meta line is the only remaining table in our main templates, because a table still gives the best display results in all browsers and resolutions. But this table is about as optimized and CSS-ized as we can make it.

The usual web monkey advice applies: if something exhibits odd behavior or refuses to work entirely, clear your browser cache and refresh the page.

As always with these tech threads, big ups to the grooviest Javascript library in the known world, jQuery, without which this would be immeasurably more painful.