http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog Improving the Internet, one image at a time. Thu, 25 Mar 2010 04:15:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en About 2-3 times every year, I have one of those "Duh! Why didn't I think of that before?" moments. This week, my "Duh!" moment was in realizing that for a great-many .png images, removing the white background in them and replacing it with transparency would more than likely result in ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=825 Parlez-vous français? :) I personally don't speak French well at all (other than knowing that when I get into trouble, I need to spend some quality time on the Google Translate web site). However, a recent comment on one of my blog postings lead me to find out about a ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=822 In case a few of you who are regular visitors to this blog were wondering about the "radio silence" from Yours Truly during the past week, I've got four little characters for you: H1N1. Yep, I got to join the world-wide epidemic and enjoy a little flu. I hadn't ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=820 How does that old saying go? The best compliment or flattery often comes in the form of imitation? :) I had an interesting experience tonight. I approved a comment on this blog from a certain email address that eventually took me to a web site called Greenficiency. Sounds ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=816 In response to Conrad Chu's comment from my previous blog posting (thanks for taking the time to comment, Conrad), I thought I would share a specific example of .png optimization related to punypng and PNGSlim. Conrad had asked me to share a concrete example to illustrate my "In my experimentation ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=812 It's been about four months since I last posted in this blog about the great, free, web-based optimization tool called punypng. Consequently, I thought I would play around with the tool a bit more tonight to see what might have changed in recent months. Related to .png optimization, I still have ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=808 Hey everyone! Just wanted to post a quick "public service announcement" that Stoyan Stefanov's smush.it tool now comes as an automated Wordpress plug-in! Smush.it offers the following resources: * stripping meta data from JPEG images * optimizing JPEG compression * converting ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=798 I came across another fantastic article the other day by Carlos Bueno on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog entitled "An Engineer's Guide to Bandwidth." Two things in particular that I really enjoyed about this article: 1. Distinguishing between bandwidth and packets. From the bandipedia.com web site: "A packet consists of a ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=793 Back in February 2008, I shared a posting about one of my favorite disc golf sites out there, discgolfersR.us. A year and a half later, we're still talking about the issue of image optimization a bit on that site, as can be seen at: http://discgolfer.ning.com/forum/topics/members-using-front-page-for I'm just happy we're talking about ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=791 I came across a couple optimization tools I was unfamiliar with tonight, so I thought I would share a quick posting to see if anyone out there knows anything about either tool: JPEG & PNG Stripper (Win95 to Win7) - (from their web site) A tool for stripping/cleaning/removing unnecessary metadata (junk) ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=787 Just for grins, I decided to re-visit my C:/ drive tonight using PNGOUTWin. I did a basic search on *.png within my C:/ drive and all sub-directories, then had PNGOUTWin do the heavy-lifting in the background while I caught up on a little work. A few thousand images later, I ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=789 I noticed recently that The MacArthur Foundation named its 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2009. For those that don't know what I am talking about, these are the awards that are often dubbed "genius grants" by the media...where people with unique talents, ideas and gifts are given money to basically play ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=781 One of the sites that inspired me to really jump into the deep end and take this long, strange and rewarding journey related to image optimization was Google Maps. It's obviously map-related, and if there is a mapping site/service out there which consumes more bandwidth per day than Google Maps ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=761 I came across a really interesting site the other day called PrintFriendly.com. Their service is a simple yet powerful one: to empower individuals viewing content on the web to have greater control over the content of any page that they wish to print to paper or .pdf format. From their ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=800 During my recent NACIS trip to Sacramento, California, I had the privilege of going out to lunch with a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad student named Daniel P. Huffman, along with three other individuals, to discuss the Ortellius software demonstration presented at the conference. Daniel seemed like a very nice person, ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=777 As I eluded to in my October 7 posting, one of the really interesting products I was introduced to at the 2009 NACIS annual meeting was Ortellius, which is described on their web site as "powerful map illustration software" designed exclusively for the Macintosh platform. Jill Saligoe-Simmel of at MapDiva.com ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=752 Day three at NACIS felt a bit more like a death march. I was exhausted from only getting about 8-9 hours of sleep the previous 72 hours. We also had an always-difficult "Future of Cartographic Perspectives" session in the morning (the international journal of NACIS that seems to always ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=748 Day Two started a lot like Day One at NACIS...not nearly enough sleep for Yours Truly. I had good intentions, but trying to catch up on a little work, coupled with catching up with a few friends (and trying to make a few new ones) at the hospitality suite, ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=745 I sleep-walked through my presentation at Practical Cartography Day at the 2009 North American Cartographic Information Society annual meeting in Sacramento, California, USA today...after struggling to get MAYBE four hours of sleep last night. However, my session: Ideas for Creating Smaller Interactive Map File Sizes in .swf Format ...seemed to ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=743 Thought I would document some of my experiences at the 2009 North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) annual meeting in Sacramento, California, USA. I list today as "Day Zero" as it is effectively just a travel day. I got to the Minneapolis Saint Paul International Airport at 3:00pm ... http://graphicsoptimization.com/blog/?p=741