Arc and Angle To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge. – Grace Hopper

Onward towards Gzip! How a little compression can save the day.

There come a few times in a budding web designer's life when they discover something very useful and incredibly helpful and they wonder, "Why on earth did nobody tell me about this before!?" And, being the collaborative souls that they are, they think, "I will share the news with all of the others so that they too will reap the benefits of this new knowledge!"

It is then that the cold truth rises to the surface. The fact is, this news is completely geeky and the topic is completely, assuredly boring to just about everyone except our inspired little geek.

Well, lucky for me I have a blog for this sort of thing. It may not interest my loved ones and does not merit an "I made a new post!" announcement on my various social networking sites, but I know that I have an audience out there. Somewhere out in the vast hinterland of the Internet, a lone shivering geek must also be asking, "Is there another way to make my web site faster!?!?!?"

And like me, they shun the easy non-standards solutions of image maps. Like me, they have read and re-read countless articles on how to optimize photos for the web. And like me, they felt there just must be something else out there. Something warm and fuzzy, like a tiny piece of code.

Today on my journeys, I learned a few new things on topics whose keywords involve GZip, htaccess, Live HTTP Headers, and YSlow. Don't go away! Now's where it gets exciting!

Just about every web developer uses Firefox add-ons, especially the Web Developer Toolbar. There are two others that are particularly useful when trying to increase the loading speed of a site and for some silly reason, I never used them until today: Yslow analyzes a site's performance based on Yahoo's rules for web performance and Live HTTP Headers displays the live communications between your browser and a site's server.

I used YSlow to analyze one of my sites. I got an "A" in everything except GZip compression. Huh? I did some reading and discovered that I might need to configure my server to output GZip compression. To check this, I scanned the dialog between my browser and the server using Live HTTP Headers. I saw that my browser sent this request: "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate."

This is the browser telling the server, "FYI, I accept compressed files if you have any."

The server ignored that request, meaning that it was not set-up to Gzip my content. Bah!

I have a shared-hosting plan and never realized that I have access to certain server set-up options. Web hosts who put dozens of clients' sites on one server would be insane to allow everyone access to the server's config file. I thought I'd just have to send them a message if I needed something on the server changed. It turns out that individual accounts may have access to certain set-up options by using an .htaccess file (hypertext access).

First, locate the file. I signed into CPanel, went to the file manager, clicked on a little check box to allow me to view hidden files, and then went into my home directory. There it was, ".htaccess". I clicked on it to edit it and added code from BetterExplained to configure the server to allow compression output.

# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>

I saved the file.

I then reloaded my site and behold! The load time was four times faster! My work here is done.

For great reading, check out these articles:

• BetterExplained: "How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression"
• Yahoo! Developer Network: "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site"