We all know that pre-fetching images can run slow because of browser limits in the HTTP protocol, right? So, I have XHTML, jQuery, Apache httpd, and PHP at my disposal. What's an easy solution to pre-fetch a lot of images, without using sprites or multiple hosts?
See, I have these themes one selects with a SELECT box. It changes the 200x200 theme image on the right of the box. Unfortunately there are like 150 of these. So, when I load the page, the progress bar keeps running to download these all.
How can I get these images pre-fetching faster without using sprites or multiple hosts?
If it's just a theme change, which probably rarely happens (right)? Then why wouldn't you just load the image for a theme when the the select is changed and a new theme is chosen? It seems "strange" to load 150 images of which 149 may not be seen.
Correct me if I'm missing the point - and if so, can you provide a screenshot so I can get an idea of what you're really trying to show?
Hindsight is probably 20/20. I probably should have implemented it in sprites, as well as for many of the buttons I used on the site. It's just that I lack a good sprite editor tool that speeds that process up.
Anyway, the strategy I went with was to use Javascript prefetch via jQuery. But even that wasn't enough. I had to wrap that function in a setTimeout(), but that only helped a little. I then had to fire that setTimeout() during a login form submit. It made the login form submit slightly longer, but made the website appear snappy on load.
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I was thinking about the applications of web scraping (still quite new to it) and came up with a question. Can you get an image from a page if there are advertisements on the page (like can you avoid advertisements and only look for the correct image content on the page)? Also, if the image is also a link to another page, can you say go to the next page and get that image (and then go from there until you either reach a certain amount or get all of the images)? This would mean avoiding going to the advertisements pages.
Absolutely. If you use a tool like kimonolabs.com this can be relatively easy. You click the data that you want on the page, so instead of getting all images including advertisements, Kimono uses the CSS selectors of the data you clicked to know which data to scrape.
You can use Kimono to scrape data within links as well. It's actually a very common use. Here's a break-down of that strategy: https://help.kimonolabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/203438300-Source-URLs-to-crawl-from-another-kimono-API
This might be a helpful solution for you, especially if you're not a programmer because it doesn't require coding experience. It's a pretty powerful tool.
I think if you are ok with PHP programming then give a look into php simple html dome parser. I have used it a lot and scrapped number of websites.
http://www.puppykisses.org/
i made a WordPress page for a client, and for some reason it is taking over a minute to load the page. The only thing that I could think of being the problem is the amount of photos that he inserted into the slider up top on the home page. It looks like all those pictures need to load before anything else pops up. But then I click on Contact or any other page that has no real images to speak of, and the problem is still there. Just wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction to fix this. thanks!
Like #David said, its the initial request (the source for the page) that is giving you the issues. This means it is unlikely an issue with hosting, and most likely an issue with your code. I would go through any plugins you have installed and disable them one-by-one, and slowly start commenting out your own custom dynamic code bit by bit, till you see what is taking so incredibly long. Then rewrite/excise that code from the site.
Start With the Basics
Keep the number of WordPress plugins you use to a minimum
Get a Proper Hosting Provider
Remove Unnecessary Code From WordPress Header -> http://goo.gl/yfRcF
Use firebug and click Network tab to check loading speed for each files
Check Suggestion how to improve website speed -> http://goo.gl/FtiX3
Install WP Super Cache plugin -> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
*If you use gallery try to use image thumbnail rather than load whole images size
Some years ago I decided I could bypass all the browser inconsistencies by producing sites entirely in Flash. Doesn't look such a good decision now so I'm re-writing my semi-CMS framework in php, javascript/jQuery and HTML. One aspect of my Flash sites which I am very pleased with is the ability to load all pages or states in the background so the user rarely requests a page that isn't already loaded. When that does happen I can display a progress bar. In AJAX I can't display progress but I also found a significant difference I hadn't anticipated. In Flash I load the .swf for page 1 completely, before starting to load page 2. That means everything including images etc. In AJAX I can't see a way to do that. I can check that the HTML file itself has completed loading, but not that all its images have loaded before loading the next HTML file. Is it possible?
If you're looking for an HTML5 solution rather than just an AJAX solution you might want to investigate the Application Cache. There is a progress event which you could hook into, though it possibly doesn't get into the level of detail you need. As far as I'm aware, resources will start downloading in the order they're listed in the manifest file.
I have been using nextgen gallery of wordpress, which uses jquery cycle.
I noticed that the images load in a lazy way (eg the gallery has 15 images, and at first only three load, then 2-3 more etc). The thing is that I create thumbnails of them so I need them to load instantly.
Does anyone knows which code should I mess with in order to make change this behaviour?
thanks!
This is because of the nextGen Gallery javascript wrapper on jQuery Cycle.
If anyone needs to modify this, s/he should mess with the ngg.slideshow.min.js.
So, I've been tasked with making a kiosk for the office for showing statistics about our SCRUM progress, build server status, rentability and so forth. It should ideally run a slideshow with bunch of different pages, some of them showing text, some showing graphs and so on.
What is the best approach for this? I first thought of powerpoint, but It should be able to take the images from a webserver so I can automate the graph generation procedure. I would also like to take text from an external source when showing "Who broke the build" or some page like that.
I have no doubt that ready-made systems exist, but I don't really know where to look for them.
Is this easy/hard in powerpoint? Or are there an ubiquous app that everybody but me knows about?
I would recommend creating it as a series of web-pages, which uses Javascript or the meta refresh tag to cycle though the different pages. Simply full-screen the browser on a spare machine, and connect it to a projector/monitor/big TV.
This has lots of benefits:
it's trivial to display images from an external server (an <img> tag)
it will cost nothing to setup (it can run on basically any functioning machine), and runs in a browser
it is quick to do (you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility, or different screen resolutions as you know the exact machine you are developing for
it's expandable - while what you describe is probably possible within Powerpoint, but if you do it as a web-page, you can use Javascript (or a JS framework like jQuery), and it's very easy to serve the pages via a web-server, then you can use any server-side scripting language.
Basically, you would have a series of files, say slide001.htm, slide002.htm and slide003.htm. Slide 1 would redirect to slide002 after 30 seconds, slide002 to slide 003, and slide003 would redirect to slide001..
The specific things you mention: graph generation and "Who broke the build" text:
Not sure which CI tool you use, but many of them generate graphs anyway, so that would be required is having one "slide" with something like <img src="http://hudson.abc/job/proj042/buildTimeGraph">
For the who-broke-the-build text, you would be easiest to run the slides as .php files served though a web-server, using XAMMP.
Then you would have a function that scrapes your CI server for whoever broke the last build, and in one of the slides, you would have <?PHP echo(who_broke_build()); ?>
(Obviously if you know some other language/system better, use that!)
The final benefit I can think of is that, if you serve the files through a web-server, you can allow people display it locally, say as their browsers home-page.
Thanks. I found jqS5 which did most of what you mentioned.
It requires 1 document where every h2 becomes a new slide.
I can then use the meta-refresh to reload to next page every 10 seconds. When I reach the end of the slides, I pull data from an aggregated RSS feed from all the different systems in order to pull information.
http://staticfree.info/projects/jqs5/