There?s a nice interview of Ben Doodger, the lead engineer of Firefox over at Builderau.com. Why don?t you have have a look.
October, 2004
15
Oct 04
Art, Music and propaganda
I?ve been at some nice exhibition and concerts that I can tell you little about. Continue reading →
13
Oct 04
GUI for Pngquant
NOTE: There is now a new version of the GUI
I first read about Pngquant in the book ‘More Eric Meyer on CSS‘. It is a small program that can keep the full transparency but reduce the colors on a PNG image.
This is something you cannot do in Photoshop or Fireworks. When optimizing the image with Pngquant you get about 50-80% reduction of the image, a image that is about 150kB turns into 30kB. And you still keep the full 8bit transparency.
For an example look at this page with Firefox, Safari or Opera. If you look closely at the Firefox logo you see that the background shines through. This is a image with 8bit transparency. What about IE then. Well, for this page I just made a * HTML CSS hack and did not show the browser any picture at all. Of course I could have made a similar image with no transparency but I did not.
The only thing that I thought was a problem was that Pngquant is a dos program. What do we say about dos programs? I certainly do not like to work in dos if I can. Well, I asked a friend of mine to make a simple GUI where you could choose the files you want to optimize and then just push OK.
There is some instructions to install the program.
1. Download the GUI and unzip it somewhere
2. Download Pngquant from the their site. (Windows binaries)
3. Download .net runtime environment from MS. (you might already have this)
4. Put the Pngquant in your $PATH (In WinXP that is C:windows/system32/)
5. You are good to go.
There is also possible to choose many files when running the program.
Thanks to Pngquant’s authors – Greg Roelofs, Jef Poskanzer and GUI author – Per Fahlén
If there is any problems, post a comment below.
5
Oct 04
Free swf graphs
Found this link over at Scriptgoddess. Amzing result, seems easy to implement and is free. Can it get better if you can live with the fact that it is Flash.
5
Oct 04
New website – Sarwi.com
We (me and my girlfriend) finally got her website finnished for launch. Hey, it only took two and half year. Alot of things has floated by in the river (Swedish saying) since then. She will use her website for writing, kind of like a blog, upload her new great illustratations and some nice background images for you to download.
The website is run on the same server as this one, with PHP and MySQL as backend. I made a admin interface for here so she can write new stuff and upload here illustration on her own. The site is valid XHTM and no tables where harmed building this site. The headings use a FIR technique, you can read more about it over at A list apart.
Why did it take such a long time to build this site. Alot of things I would say. When I first started I made her just a normal static HTML website where i was the one to help her update the page. After I while i understod that this would not work. I was then starting to learn PHP and MySQL so I thought this would be a great project to use my new knowledge. I did have some problems along the way, mostly with the upload feature. Along the way has there been about 10 redesigns. I and my girlfriend was never really satisfied with the layout of the website. Last redesign was about 3 weeks ago. Also the firs versions of the site used tables, did not validate and there was alot of crappy code. This was before I start learning about webstandards, XHTML and CSS. When starting to seperate content and structure the redesign worked quite easy, just make some changes in the CSS file you’re done.
Well, enough of writing, here it is.