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 felt good since the end of September, but my symptoms finally progressed to the point of a chronic fever of 99.5 F to 100.5 F, chills, a sore throat, sinus congestion, etc. I think the night I went down to microwave myself some popcorn, only to have to try three times to punch in the right time on the microwave because my hand and fingers were shaking so badly, was the night I thought: “Okay, this might actually be serious.” I also had a really unusual experience of feeling like I had some electric charges running through my body when I would sneeze. Wha-CHOO! …and then it would feel as though my entire body from my neck to the bottom of my rib cage was having a current of electricity passing through it. A very strange sensation…but I’m FINALLY starting to feel like I’m on the mend.
During the peak of the H1N1 pleasantness for me, I visited the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s web portal for the topic…and, in my delirium, thought I’d better look at a few of the image from an image optimization perspective. The results of that bit of experimentation can be viewed below:
Unoptimized 170×637 pixel .gif graphic – 16,173 bytes
Optimized 170×637 pixel .png graphic – 184 bytes
Unoptimized 150×160 pixel .jpg graphic – 23,734 bytes
Optimized 150×160 pixel .jpg graphic – 15,688 bytes
Unoptimized 136×184 pixel .jpg graphic – 20,801 bytes
Optimized 136×184 pixel .jpg graphic – 11,762 bytes
xat.com’s Image Optimizer did all the heavy-lifting on these three sample images! I used custom zonal compression and the removal of excess colors to reduce the size of the two optimized .jpg files, and also used the tool to convert from .gif to .png format as well. I even gave PNGSlim and punypng a shot at further reducing the sizes of the resulting .png and .jpg output (respectively), but all three files could not be further reduced in size.
All-told, 59.2 KB of imagery was able to be reduced to 26.9 KB in cumulative size, an improvement of 55 percent! Excellent results, from a minimal amount of effort on my part.
I wouldn’t wish H1N1 on anyone out there…as it is nasty! Here’s to hoping none of you out there get it like I did…and here’s to hoping it doesn’t force me to take any more “extended vacations” from this blog! 
