Apollo new portal quick review

I had this wonderfull chance to test www.apollo.lv upcomming portal version. In this quick review I’ll start with some imperfections, and finish with some good words afterwards.

  • Probably the most notable and most visible drawback is that portal design lacks flexibility. I really like some competitor portals, mainly because their designs are fluid and takes advantage of higher screen resolutions. This is how new portal design looks at Full High Definition resolution.
  • The code is not W3C valid. Although this is not extremely important, it usually shows, that coder cares about the code he writes, and is able to follow standards.
  • I’ve tested portal loading performance for several times, and average complete site loading time was 10.5 seconds. So that could be faster. Latter site surfing performance is greatly improved when all of the files are loaded into browser cache, but still there are things to improve.
  • One thing is that all JavaScript files that are loaded from one domain should be packed in one file, thus extremely decreasing loading time, because major vast of time would be no more spent for just sending useless GET requests.

As you can see in these statistics, now JavaScript code is splited in multiple files:

  1. 10 js from static.apollo.lv
  2. 6 js files from apollolv.adocean.pl
  3. 6 js files from apollo.lv

  • Same holds true for *.css files
  • One last, similar technique to increase design loading speed is what’s called css spriting. It means, that all visual elements, such as borders, corners, backgrounds and buttons are stored into one *.jpg or *.gif file, and then using CSS, positioned accordingly. This technique has two major advantages. First – less files means faster loading. Second, jpg/gif compression is far more effective, because the same Huffman encoding table can be used for all images.

Here are a few positive things.

  • It was a positive surprise that Apollo is using HTTP compression. Although this is not a new feature in upcoming portal version, it is still worth to point out. I wish everybody used it.
  • Twitter account for Apollo is very cool. It shows that portal technical creators are following “web fashion”

That would be about it. I will certainly keep an eye to this portal evolution.

Good luck!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many water molecules are there in the glass of water?

Image
How many water molecules are in a glass of water? This glass is filled with 200 ml water. That is 0,2 l of water. First, to get started, we need to convert volume to mass. Since 1l water equals 1kg water, then our 200 ml glass is filled with 0.2 kg water. In school chemistry probably in 8th grade there was a term Mole. Mole is a unit and it measures number of molecules. One mole has 6.0221415×10 23 molecules in it. And another term is molar mass. The molar mass of an element is the atomic weight in grams per mole. In other words molar mass states - how much does one mole of particular substance weight. The molar mass for distilled water is 18 g/mol or converting to kg, it is 0,018 kg / mol. So, now lets do some calculations. First, let's calculate - how many moles of water there are in the glass. Moles = mass / molar mass = 0,2 kg / (0,018 kg/mol) = 11.11 moles And then, let's calculate how many molecules there are in the 11.11 moles Number of molecules = number of mols * m
Read more

What does http-equiv stands for?

Many web developers uses meta http-equiv tag, without solid understanding what does it means. http-equiv stands for: hypertext transfer protocol equivalent and is equivalent to HTTP response header. So putting: <http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <META http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> in HTML as meta TAG has the same effect as declaring HTTP response header Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 That is why they are called ‘equivalent’. It is recommended to use HTTP header over HTML http-equiv meta tags. Multiple headers with the same name may be present only if the values may be concatenated.
Read more