Day 21 of 365: Optimization

[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][custom_headline type=”center” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”true”]Optimization[/custom_headline][text_output]Inability to concentrate on a single task for long periods (at the moment, defined as 5 minutes or more) is a serious issue for me at the moment. This morning I was working on a customer site, Dave Neal And Associates, and their site needs updates sometime soon (appearance, SEO, etc.) But, one thing that isn’t a problem is the site’s speed: it run nice and snappy.

This site runs on the same dedicated server in my setup, but, it wasn’t running nearly as snappy. In fact, despite being cached with CloudFlare, along with other various optimization, it was still taking as long as 7 seconds to resolve, load HTML, and finish pulling in all the JavaScript. Sure, it’s my personal site, and I suppose it doesn’t matter THAT much if it loads lowly, but it was annoying me.

I suddenly started digging in, ripping through quite a bit of what was loaded on the site.  See, this site often acts as a prototyping system, where I load in all sorts of crud, test it, and decide if it’s going to be worth deploying on “real” sites later on.  So, there’s all sorts of junk on here that often just doesn’t belong.  And tons of posts that are “junk” only used for testing.

So, for half an hour I managed to concentrate on one task long enough to re-optimize the site.  From 7 seconds it dropped down to four seconds.  Good enough.

Well, it would have been good enough it I didn’t write this blog post, which made me think about the whole optimization problem again.  So, I started digging through it again – I planned on being in bed, and comparing results for it with other sites that I host and maintain.  With that, I’ve got page loads down to between 1 and 2 seconds. It also does things like lazy loading for images, which helps speed things up a bit, and more 🙂

I can’t say it was a great use of my time, but, on a day where I don’t feel like I accomplished a whole lot on any one thing (I worked on probably 60 things, but only finished this one 😛 ), it’s a small win :-)[/text_output][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][line][custom_headline type=”center” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”true”]Today’s Stats[/custom_headline][text_output]

  • Workouts: 0 Points
  • Cigarettes Smoked: 20 Points – didn’t smoke 🙂
  • Healthy Eating: 2 points.  Good breakfast, horrible lunch, “ok” supper.

Projects Worked on:

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