Ok, so I'm a dick -- everyone knows that, but... Regarding web page design, I'm afraid I must disagree with Dave. Having a page that takes 10 minutes to load from a dial-up connection is just NOT an acceptable situation. My input is this: I strongly believe the SPORRS page would be better served by using small thumbnail gif images to index the much larger jpeg images. Why? Because it would make things faster. Don't believe me?
Humor me by performing the following experiment. Get out your watch so you can make some time measurements. Now go to my (rather lame and stale) web page. To save you some bother, go directly to: http://www.eesoft.com/rr/owhikcm.htm This will load up 4 little (well not THAT little) gif thumbnails. Make note of how long it takes to load this page. It should only take a few seconds on most dialup connections. Each of these 4 gifs is about 10K, and they are really a little bigger than they need to be. Ok, so now that you've timed that, click on any one of the 4 thumnails and time how long it takes to download the resulting image. Of the 4 jpegs, 3 are about 80K, and one is about 50K. Ok, experiment over -- what did we learn? Let me guess, it took about twice as long to load the one big image as it did to load the 4 little images. Why? Well, to see the thumbnails, we had to download about 40K worth of stuff. However, IF I didn't give you these gifs, and instead used jpegs like the sporrs page, you would have had to download nearly 300K worth of stuff, which obviously would take more than 6 times as long to do. Granted, my jpegs ARE about twice the size of the ones on the sporrs page (there's a reason for this too). Now, with the sporrs page, each jpeg is about 40K, and there are about 22 of them (last time I counted) which means you must download 880K of stuff just to complete the main sporrs page -- this is nearly 1M, and although I can download that in a few seconds at work, most folks with their dialup modems aren't going to hang around for the 5 to 10 minutes it will take to download this. What could be done? We could make little thumnail gifs of each image, which admittedly would look pretty crummy, but would end up about 7K each (remember, mine are bigger than necessary). Then, instead of 880K, you would only need to load 154K to see the thumbnails, a speed increase of about 570%. Of course, to see the big image, you WOULD have to click on the thumnail, and wait for that jpeg to download, which is about another 40K. The BIG difference would be, in my proposal, you would only be waiting for the jpegs YOU select, rather than being forced to wait for ALL of them, as is the case presently. The only advantage to the present situation is that IF you want to look at ALL of the images, the present scheme is superior to the one I use. On the other hand, in MOST instances, you probably only want to look at a few images, in which case my scheme is more efficient. The other question some of you may ponder is why my jpegs are twice as big as those on sporrs. This is because I am saving them at a higher quality setting which preserves more of the image detail, but uses less compression. The result is a better looking image that takes twice as long to download. I give you crummy looking thumbnails to select from, and then I give you a pretty decent quality image to view at full size, should you choose to do so. Of course, each person has his/her own way of doing things, and I'm NOT looking to insult, degrade, or otherwise start a fight here. I just think the sporrs page would work better for most people if it loaded faster. Who amongst you agree with me? One final idea is to limit the number of shots that can be up there at any time. Just pick a number, like 20. Then, as new shots come in, old shots get pushed out in the same order that they came in. Let's face it, once you've seen an image, there's really not much reason to come back and look at it again. If an image is up for a week, that's probably long enough to give anyone who wants to, a chance to see it. Then, if you visited the site once a week, you would probably get to see fresh material each time you stop by. Grumpy [EMAIL PROTECTED] --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects X-Mozilla-Status: 8011 Content-Length: 2684
