Bit Revolver

Every developer loves a good easter egg every now and then, and the only thing more fun than hiding them is finding them. In “Secrets In Websites“, Robert Accenttura tracked down easter eggs hidden in the headers and html source of 10 prominent websites. The eggs range from Yahoo! News’ homage to Sesame Street, to Slashdot embedding Futurama quotes in custom HTTP headers, to an unintentional easter egg produced by a server bug on the NSA’s website that produced a few bits about “top secret data collection”.

Link via Daring Fireball.

Of all the factors that can affect the load time of a web page, fetching handfuls of stylesheets and javascript files is certainly high on the list. Many would approach a solution to this at the server level, however Niels Leenheer has an interesting solution that takes place at the script level, instead.

Leenheer describes his solution in “Make Your Pages Load Faster by Combining and Compressing Javascript and CSS Files“. The step-by-step goes like this:

1. Organize CSS and JavaScript files into directories dedicated to those types of files.
2. Mod_rewrite the URLs of those directories to a PHP script, passing along the paths to the original css or javascript files in the query string.
3. Use the PHP script to concatenate the stylesheets/scripts, gzip the output and send it to the client.

I have not tested this scheme, but Leenheer reports that a test page’s load time was drastically reduced from 1095 ms to 400 ms.

Hot off the presses at A List Apart is “Whitespace“, perhaps one of the most interesting web design articles that I’ve read in a while. The article thoroughly covers the subject of nothing, inside and out. Designer Marc Boulton covers every aspect of nil, and covers it quite well.

Seriously though, the effect of negative space on design is quite fascinating. Boulton discusses:

• The feeling of elegance and sophistication that’s communicated by whitespace.
• The ability of whitespace to maintain balance and produce harmony among the elements of a design.
• Drawing the reader’s attention to specific elements using whitespace.

For the full story, read “Whitespace” at A List Apart.