Tech Note: The Never-Ending Quest for a Faster Loading Page
In the never-ending search for a faster loading web page, I’m pleased to announce that more than 440K has been trimmed out of LGF’s front page today, and loading that bad boy should be much snappier now.
I discovered that the Google +1 buttons on the front page were loading about 44K of Javascript for each instance — and if there are 10 posts on the front page, that’s a whopping 440K+ of Javascript total.
I’m using the AddThis service to generate those buttons; there may be a way to avoid the ridiculous overhead by using Google +1 directly. But for now I’ve disabled those buttons on the front page. They’re still available on individual articles, and on LGF Pages (where only one 44K instance loads).
At the same time I’m trying out a new asynchronous method for loading LGF’s Javascript code, and I’m now concatenating all the Javascript we use into one big file to avoid multiple file accesses; if you witness any odd behavior, let me know in this thread. I’ve already discovered that the Opera browser gets very unhappy with this technique (crashes, in fact), so it’s disabled in Opera.