Erik Runyon

It’s been fairly well documented that the average size of webpages has been growing by leaps and bounds, with images making up the majority of the size. Based on my own stats for 160+ HigherEd responsive sites, images account for 73% of the total download. And when you’re dealing with a long-form page like www.ND.edu, images can account for even more (92% to be exact). In a situation like this, finding ways to cut down on the number of images, or deferring the loading of images, can result in a huge impact on not just the download size, but load-time as well.

As a developer, I’m always interested in finding new tools. Often this comes from chatting with other developers and finding out what they use and why. In the spirit of this, below are the tools I use a daily basis in case it helps someone else find somethig useful.

If you’ve been doing web development for a while, you’ve no doubt worked with Flash. It was amazing in its heyday, allowing us to do things we couldn’t do with vanilla html/css/javascript. But like many technologies in the web, it was abused and used it ways it shouldn’t have, or were just plain obnoxious (Flash splash pages anyone?). But it wasn’t until the iPhone shipped without Flash support that most of us started to doubt its longevity.

In a recent discussion on Twitter, I was asked which podcasts I listen to. Since the list wouldn’t fit into a 140 character tweet, I figured I’d post the list here in case it would help others find new shows.

I’m a big fan of the AppleTV, so when Google announced the Chromecast for $35, I was immediately intrigued. The first thing you need to know is that it will not replace your AppleTV (if you have one). It has nowhere near the features of Apple’s $99 hobby device, but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting.

This year I had the opportunity to present at Breaking Development. I’ve attended twice previously and always come away with more ideas and inspiration than I can feasibly find time to implement.

Carousels continue to be a hot topic. The numbers I posted back in January resulted in quite a bit of discussion. Out of curiosity, I decided to revisit the data now that I have more data to pull from. The following numbers are from January 1 through June 30, 2013. We’ll be looking at the same five sites which include ND.edu and four un-named Notre Dame sites.

Back in January I posted numbers gathered from the HigherEd RWD Directory. The size of the list has more than doubled since then. The bad news? Almost every number has increased (that’s a bad thing). Additional stats since last report includes image count, size and percentage of page weight.

On a side note. Last June the directory had 16 entries. Over the course of the year we added 100 responsive/adaptive sites.

I had the opportunity to re-present my talk (Rebuilding a university homepage to be “responsive”. Twice. In less than a year.) from last fall’s HighEdWeb national conference at this year’s Michigan regional conference in Flint, MI. The majority of the presentation is the same, but it includes updated data from the RWD directory and some interesting stats from the BCS bowl game in January.

Let’s be honest. Google has made their feelings perfectly clear when it comes to feeds. Feedburner has been languishing for years. They were working on a half-baked new interface only for it to disappear. They deprecated its API. It’s obvious the service is no longer actively supported, and with the recent sun-setting of Google Reader, I have no faith it will stick around much longer. So rather than wait for that to happen, I decided to move on now.