futtta's blog

I finally found some time to continue to work my other WordPress plugin. WP DoNotTrack checks for elements being added to the DOM by JavaScript to stop 3rd party tracking by some of the major plugins or themes.

Version 0.6.0, which I released last week, features a new “forced” option. This mode aims to provide better compatibility with JavaScript-optimizing plugins such as Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache by adding the relevant code only after those optimizers have done their job, using the output buffer. There will probably be a 0.6.1 today or tomorrow, to solve a small problem with mixed HTTP/HTTPS requests on the admin-page while in HTTPS. The output buffer sure is a powerful thing and for version 0.7.0, I’ll build on that to optionally filter the full HTML (with PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser) to stop unwanted requests for images, scripts or iFrames in there.

Do contact me if you found a bug, if you have questions or if you’d like specific feature to be added, I tend to rely heavily on user feedback to improve my plugins! And if you’re happy with how it works, drop by on the WP DoNotTrack-page on wordpress.org to rate it and/ or to confirm it works with your version of WordPress!

So stupid me made a (smallish) mistake when working on 1.1.0, which caused WP YouTube Lyte (rapidly approaching 80.000 downloads, thanks guys & girls) to load immediately instead of waiting for the “document loaded” event (lazy loading). That got fixed in 1.1.2 (which also loads the CSS differently, resulting in 1 file less to request), but the mistake did get me to re-investigate performance.

Exactly how fast is WP YouTube Lyte nowadays? I fired up some webpagetest.org IE9-instances in the Amsterdam node to compare this WP YouTube Lyte powered post on my test-blog with an identical blogpost with default YouTube embedded video. These are the jury’s results for the fastest of 10 runs in both cases (click on the image to actually see the details):

The main figures to compare (normal YouTube embed vs WP YouTube Lyte):

• time till document complete: 1.612s vs 1.047s
• time till fully loaded: 4.358s vs 1.385s
• total number of requests: 13 vs 9
• combined size of requests: 446 KB vs 77 KB

So using WP YouTube Lyte instead of normal YouTube embeds results in less files to download, less data to transport, the page being ready for interaction quicker and having everything loaded a whole lot faster. These figures are for a single YouTube on a page, but the impact is all the more important if you have multiple video’s on one page (e.g. a category or tag-page for “music” or “videos”) off course.

The full comparison based on 10 tests on both pages:

So there you go. When in doubt, check these stats and then go install WP YouTube Lyte, because after all speed matters!

Every now and again you should go out of your comfort zone to get a new perspective on things. Or so they say. I love my comfort zone, it took me 43 years to build the damned thing after all, so please leave me be, will you?

But things break and in this particular case the screen of my trusty old Samsung Galaxy S2 went dark, literally. I brought the phone in for repairs and grabbed the only test-device left at work as a temporary replacement. It was a Samsung Omnia 7 with Windows Phone 7. Now look at this little droid-boy getting pushed out of his comfort zone!

I’ve been using it for 5 days now, so why not make a small list of what sucks and what’s great? Here goes:

What sucks:

• The browser. It’s not I can’t live without Firefox Mobile, but boy does Mobile IE7 suck.
• No Internet connection sharing (not over USB, not over Bluetooth, not over WiFi)
• The fact that the phone doesn’t present itself as a USB storage device when I connect it over USB with my Ubuntu netbook
• The lack of an SD card slot
• I can’t login with my Live ID (my ancient Hotmail address) on my phone (but it does work in Zune), which means I can’t install applications from the Marketplace (I’m asked to call support! Seriously?)
• The fact that after installing Zune on my work PC and then waiting until I got home because Zune doesn’t do proxies, I still wasn’t able to upgrade to Windows Phone 7.5 (which does have Internet connection sharing and a more decent browser)
• There’s no way to reliably fetch information from the Exchange servers at work. Every once in a while mail gets downloaded, but in general there’s error code 8501001D ruining my Exchange experience

What’s great? Just one bullet point actually;

• The UI!

Really, despite my grievances about how poorly the device integrates with the outside world, my general feeling about Windows Phone is positive, and that is because Metro really is that great! The screens are sober, with lots of space and a prominent place for content (text & typography). Applications scroll horizontally to display different views and it’s the typography that makes this pretty discoverable. The graphics effects and sound add to the great responsive “feel” of the UI. And tiles are a radical break form the icon-based approach that is typical of iOS (and Android, classic Mac OS, Windows 3.11 and …), you could compare them to widgets (as seen on Android), but without the anarchy and clutter.

So yeah, really, I ♥ Metro! I hope Google (Android), Mozilla (b2g) and Ubuntu (Unity) take clues from what is, in my view, a pretty radical break in graphical user interface design, because I would love the computing environments in my comfort zone to be more about content and less about chrome as well!

You can do great things in JavaScript; accessing the DOM and adding, changing or removing nodes as you please. It is exactly that technology that WP YouTube Lyte is based upon; the PHP-part writes out an almost empty div’s with className “lyte” and with as id the YouTube ID, which the JS-part finds after the main document has loaded to render the “LYTE player”. Great for performance, so I was pretty surprised when DerTux, one of WP YouTube Lyte users wrote;

BTW, Google Page Speed dislikes Lyte:

“The following JavaScript call stack (executed 4 times) caused reflows that took 52 milliseconds: @wp-content/plugins/wp-youtube-lyte/lyte/lyte-min.:1:0“

Although 52ms for a page with 3 “LYTE players” is minimal when compared to loading the same page with the full embedded YouTube player, the above statement bugged me enough to search the web for information about reflows and how to prevent them. Some of the more interesting articles:

• Speed up your JavaScript Part 4 by by Nicholas C. Zakas
• Speeding up JavaScript: Working with the DOM on Google Code
• Rendering: repaint, reflow/relayout, restyle by Stoyan Stefanov

And this video by Paul Irish does a great job explaining reflows:

Based on these pointers I started reworking lyte.js while testing on Google’s Page Speed Online (as far as I can tell the only tool that can detect reflows and then only as an experimental feature) to minimize reflows. I ended up:

• adding the pL div, which contains the LYTE player UI (play-button, controls & YouTube thumbnail), only after all styles have been applied
• adding the tC div, which contains the title, only after the tT div (with the title as received in the YouTUbe jsonp-call) has been added to it
• replaced el.clientWidth (and el.clientHeight) with el.style.width.match(/\d+/g)[0]
• some widths and heights did not have a unit specified in the dynamically generated CSS and this sloppy coding apparently also (indirectly) caused reflow

WP YouTube Lyte 1.1.1 will get pushed out in a couple of days (Thursday, probably) and will ship with these performance optimizations (and a fix for a regression which causes some styles not to be applied any more).

Ik probeerde me de afgelopen dagen bewust af te sluiten van de niet aflatende stroom aan informatie over het verschrikkelijke busongeval in Zwitserland. Dat is niet makkelijk, want met elk toevallig meegepikt beeldfragment voel ik me opnieuw meegezogen in een emotionele draaikolk van onontkoombare betrokkenheid.

Het land is in rouw, maar moet dat? Brengen de media nieuws of emotie? In welke verhouding? Voor wie? Waarom? Niet voor de slachtoffers, niet voor de familie.

Tot daar de ratio. Maar een kind verliezen …

(Radiohead – Give up the Ghost)

Nope, 1.0.0 wasn’t WP YouTube Lytes final destination, the train has left that station to arrive at version 1.1.0 yesterday. Main new features include:

• an updated LYTE-player UI:
• larger display of preview image (background-size:cover instead of contain)
• changed look of title placeholder
• updated controls image
• support for “Infinite Scroll” as proposed by “der Tuxman” and Olivier
• beta-support for YouTube’s JS API as requested by Yun
• annoyance-avoidance: check for “Karma Blocker” addon and warn, based on feedback from Leona
• translation: added Romanian, thanks to Alexander and Web Hosting Geeks

I’ll leave it to Avi Buffalo to show you how the new UI looks like:

And I changed the short description (which features prominently on the wordpress.org plugin page) to better match main features:

High performance YouTube video, playlist and audio-only embeds which don’t slow down your blog and offer optimal accessibility.

Next stop: 1.2.0. Any feature requests?

It was time to put my money where my mouth is, or at least to give the use of a CDN a try. Based on previous tests MaxCDN seemed like a decent, dirt-cheap solution, so that’s what the js, css & images for this blog are served from now.

Setting this up was very easy:

1. log into MaxCDN and set up a pull zone on static-cdn.blog.futtta.be with origin blog.futtta.be
2. create static-cdn.blog.futtta.be in the web interface of my DNS-provider (as a CNAME to the domain-name provided)
3. configure WP Super Cache to use static-cdn.blog.futtta.be instead of the non-cdn static.blog.futtta.be)

The speed difference can be huge, especially when routing to my origin VPS-server in Germany isn’t great. I’m sure my 2 overseas users and Google will approve!

Bandwidth-wise, with 10MB/day, I seem to be far from the 1TB/year I’m allowed, so if you’d like me to setup a (temporary) pull zone for your blog so you can check out if this would work for you then just drop me a line.