Development and subtext skins/theme posts have been very little over the last month of so and the reason for this is that I have been doing freelance web development projects.
We all know how important it is to make sure that no matter what type of website your developing making sure it performs at its best is vital. I’m not going to go into topics such as code-behind, data access, ETAGs, or caching, I’m going to touch on the basic level of html and CSS.
The number of http requests our site makes can be the difference between a potential customer and an actual customer. Now this can be broken down into the number of elements, the number of JavaScript files and even the amount of CSS files included on the page.
A good developer will minify, compress and merge all JS, CSS files used, but what about images? RSS icons, twitter icons, post category icons? Many big companies such as Amazon, Google all use CSS Sprites. They’re nothing new but creating such sprites can be a long and tedious process. Not any more a couple of weeks back I was pointed in the direction of codeplex to a project called Sprite Generator:
Sprite Generator makes it easier for web developers to create sprite images. It’s developed in C#.
This application creates a nearly optimal insertation of images into a CSS Sprite.The major algorithms used rest on O-tree based rectangle packing.
It’s simple as 1,2,3.
Point the application to where all the images are located you want to be in the CSS Sprite and set your outputs, generate, voila.
Fantastic open source application, try it yourself – http://spritegenerator.codeplex.com/
