futtta's blog

I’m not a developer, I’m just a random guy who was lucky enough to be around when the web started to happen, back in the nineties. And over the years I might have learned a bit about web development, but still I’m not a real developer. And yet, there I am with two WordPress plugins, fiddling with PHP and JavaScript. I’ll let you in on what’s not really a secret; I’ve made some ridiculous mistakes while coding those plugins. Trial and error, you know. Testing, fixing, releasing and getting feedback. Especially getting feedback!

Real users telling me it doesn’t work, asking for extra features or making proposals to make it better overall, that what I thrive on. The latest example; JavaScript namespaces. Not being a developer means that I know as much about coding patterns as I know about cows. I just hit the keyboard real hard and hope the browser understands what I throw at it. Until a good friend told me to use JavaScript namespaces, to avoid conflicts with other people’s JavaScript. And a week later someone wrote my software just didn’t work any more and I had to start digging and found a JavaScript conflict that was introduced with a new version of AddThis

And those are the moments one grows, as a developer; you start searching for information about scope, anonymous functions and namespaces. You try, it doesn’t work and you dig some deeper, until you stumble on a great question and answer on Stack Overflow with a link to a very detailed article about JavaScript coding patterns. So you go back into ‘vi’ and start changing the code once again and than all of a sudden you have a working version, which your Polish user confirms fixes the problem and you learned a lot while bugfixing.

So kudo’s to all you guys & girls for the great feedback, you rock! Here’s WP YouTube Lyte version 1.1.3 to thank you.

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!

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).

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?

On a blog that uses WP YouTube Lyte which I happened to stumble across, the following warning was displayed:

Hey! If you’re browsing in Firefox, there’s a very good chance that you won’t see youtube / video embeds.

As I really don’t like bugs but couldn’t reproduce any issue myself, I contacted the blog’s owner to find out what was happening. The description of the problem was pretty confusing:

The still shot/first frame of the video is there with the play icon, so things look hopeful, but when you click on the play icon the entire video disappears from the page. Page structure / layout does not change, but you are left staring at a blank white box where the embed should be.

A white div of death, really … Anyway, to cut a long story short, the misbehavior was caused by “Karma Blocker“. This Firefox addon “blocks resources based on their karma”, using a ruleset that scores behavior to blocks banners, trackers and also WP YouTube Lyte (or rather, the YouTube iFrame). Apparently the combination of the bad karma of JavaScript and the iFrame triggered the blocking mechanism.

I couldn’t code around Karma Blocker and chances are small the default configuration will give YouTube iFrames better karma, but the next version of WP YouTube Lyte (1.1.0, to be available soon) will display a simple message kindly letting users know they might want to adapt their Karma Blocker’s weightings.

But why is karma punishing me?

I just released the one dot ohhhh dot ohhhhhhhhhh version of WP YouTube Lyte!

From the changelog:

• new: also works on (manual) excerpts; just add a httpv link to the “excerpt” field on the post/page admin (based on feedback from Ruben@tuttingegneri)
• new: if youtube-url contains “start” or “showinfo” parameters, these are used when playing the actual video. This means that you can now jump to a specific time in the YouTube video or stop the title/ author from being displayed (based on feedback from a.o. Miguel and Josh D)
• update: javascript now initiates either after full page load or after 1 second (whatever comes first), thus avoiding video not showing due to other requests taking too long
• update: bonus feature stops lockerz.com tracking by addtoany (you’ll still want to hide the “earn pointz” tab though)
• bugfix: prevent the playing video to be in front of e.g. a dropdown-menu or lightbox (thanks to Matt Whittingham)
• bugfix: solve overlap between player and text when option was set not to show links (reported by Josh D)

And an appropriate vid to go with this new release:

1. This blog:
• 121 blogposts (69 “real” posts and 52 aggregated lifestream-events)
• 75,913 pageviews, the most popular individual article being Kate Bush live (en bijna bloot) (7209 views). Off all new 2011 blogposts, Audio-only YouTube embedding with WP YouTube Lyte 0.7 was read most (2683 views).
• 317 comments (approx. half of which are bound to be my own replies to other people’s comments)
• Main goal for 2012: keep on learning, sharing and enjoying myself while doing so
  
2. WP YouTube Lyte, my WordPress plugin to do “lazy load YouTube embedding”, really took off:
• 8 minor and 3 major releases (from 0.6.5 to 0.9.4), introducing support for features such as audio-only YouTube, embedding playlists, changing player size on the fly and translations in 6 languages (thanks to those six great contributors).
• 48260 downloads
• Main goal for 2012: stabilize and reach the magic 1.0.0 (which will probably include an optimized initialization-mechanism)
3. My WP DoNotTrack plugin is somewhat … younger:
• 2 releases
• 336 downloads
• Goals for 2012:
• stop more types of tracking (a.o. by including black- or whitelist filtering of the HTML using the output buffer)
• improve filtering
• integrate (and possibly automate) tracking-detection using the webpagetest.org API
• promote the idea of “DoNotTrack” in general and for WordPress and WP plugins & themes in particular (the plugin is just a means, not an end in itself)

But enough with all the navel-gazing, thanks for b(e)aring with me & have a great 2012 guys & girls!