As I have eluded to in this blog in the past, if you don’t find me at my laptop working on designing maps or optimizing imagery, you’ll probably find me out on one of our area disc golf courses here in Southwestern Minnesota…enjoying what has to be one of the best sports ever invented! When the weather conditions are poor and/or time does not allow me to get out and play, however, sometimes the next best thing is hanging out at discgolfersR.us, a social network at Ning devoted to our wonderful sport. MANY thanks go out to Terry Calhoun, the brains and brawn behind the discgolfersR.us site…as it is FINALLY a place where all of us “addicts” can go to compare notes and learn about what disc golfers are doing in other parts of the planet.

discgolfersR.us is a WONDERFUL site! However, if it has one major flaw or shortcoming at the moment, it is the fact that anyone and everyone can upload imagery to the site without any controls related to image optimization (along the same lines as Flickr or eBay). People with little/no understanding of how electronic imagery works are uploading files with little/no attention being paid to image size, file format or optimization tasks. An example of that fact can be seen below:

Unoptimized 2424×2400 pixel .jpg graphic (displayed at 40×40 pixels) – 408 KB

Unoptimized 40×40 pixel .jpg graphic – 2,625 bytes

Optimized 40×40 pixel .jpg graphic – 1,837 bytes

The above example is a perfect illustration of what happens when you place nuclear weapons in the hands of small terrorism cells. This graphic is intended to be displayed at 40×40 pixels, yet it has been uploaded to the ning server at 2424×2400 pixels…over 400 KB in size! Quickly converting that image to the proper 40×40 pixel dimensions immediately reduces that image down to 2.56 KB, and a bit of additional optimization work in xat.com Image Optimizer further reduced that image down to 1.79 KB…an improvement of 99.6 percent. For every three visitors to the discgolfersR.us web site, over 1 MB in bandwidth could be conserved.

Additional optimization opportunities exist as well! Below are just a few more examples of this fact:

Unoptimized 128×128 pixel .png avatar – 43,101 bytes

Optimized 128×128 pixel .png avatar – 1,172 bytes

Unoptimized 14×532 pixel .gif graphic – 2,393 bytes

Optimized 14×532 pixel .png graphic – 1,735 bytes

Roughly two minutes of effort on the above two graphics takes 44.4 KB in file size down to 2.83 KB, an improvement of 94.6 percent. With hundreds/thousands of daily visitors to this particular social network, it doesn’t take much to imagine how a little effort along these lines will make an enormous positive impact…not only for the visitors of the discgolfersR.us site, but also for the folks who manage all of the server space on the Ning network. I know Terry, so maybe I can convince him to let us “tinker” and serve as a bit of a watch dog related to the imagery that is uploaded to the site! Anything I can do to help make one of the coolest online hang-outs for disc golfers out there just a little bit better would be an honor.

Posted by datonn on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 3:46 pm.