Image via Shutterstock

If you’re browsing Little Green Footballs on a mobile phone tonight, you’ll notice a huge improvement in the speed of loading our home page. Today I implemented some code that serves tiny smartphone-sized images for all the front page articles if you’re using a phone, instead of full-sized images scaled down by the browser.

This means that loading the front page on a mobile phone is now an order of magnitude faster and uses much less data bandwidth; the images for our articles are now typically in the neighborhood of 10-20K instead of 100K or more, so you should notice a rather large improvement. (On a desktop computer or laptop, you’ll still see the full-sized high resolution images, of course.)

Another enhancement implemented today: embedded tweets now automatically recognize Twitter videos, so if a tweet contains a video it will render as a beautiful full-width video. All you have to do is post the web address of the tweet in a comment or LGF Page; the rest is automatic.

This is what a full-width Twitter video looks like:

Relive the year in film. #Oscarshttps://t.co/VJ8Zg6T9hn

— The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 29, 2016

And one more improvement to note: the “Featured Pages” and “Recent Pages” lists in our right sidebar now include images (scaled for the smallest possible download, of course!) for any LGF Page that contains a “meta image.”