Adaptive Images
The landscape of web continues to change as we get more and more devices that we need to support. One concern when creating websites that should accommodate all screen sizes is image size. The acceptable size for an image is not the same across devices, so we usually end up compromising image size and quality on all devices; not the optimal solution, of course. Enter a solution called Adaptive Images, a PHP / .htaccess based solution for detecting screen size and delivering optimally sized images for the user's device.
Adaptive images provides an outstanding set of instructions for customizing the images generated by PHP's GD library, so you aren't stuck with rubbish images. Do yourself a favor and check out Adaptive Images -- it could be the perfect solution for your website imagery needs.
![From Webcam to Animated GIF: the Secret Behind chat.meatspac.es!]()
My team mate Edna Piranha is not only an awesome hacker; she's also a fantastic philosopher! Communication and online interactions is a subject that has kept her mind busy for a long time, and it has also resulted in a bunch of interesting experimental projects...
![How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam]()
I love almost every part of being a tech blogger: learning, preaching, bantering, researching. The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe: dealing with SPAM comments. For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day. PER DAY. Bloating my database...
![Web Notifications API]()
Every UI framework has the same set of widgets which have become almost essential to modern sites: modals, tooltips, button varieties, and notifications. One problem I find is each site having their own widget colors, styles, and more -- users don't get a consistent experience. Apparently the...
![Creating Spacers with Flexbox]()
I was one of the biggest fans of flexbox before it hit but, due to being shuffled around at Mozilla, I never had the chance to use it in any practice project; thus, flexbox still seems like a bit of a mystery to me. This greatly...
This is the next BIG thing … I believe!
Will this method work with Joomla CMS sites?
It should — you’ll need to do your research about .htaccess though to make sure you don’t break Joomla.
One thing I noticed with this… it says the page loads a tiny bit of JavaScript first and creates a cookie with window size. That cookie is not going to be able to be read until the second page load. So this idea won’t work for the first time a visitor sees your site. Am I wrong?
You’re wrong ;)
If you include the script from an external file you’re right – because the time taken to fetch the external file is more than it takes to continue loading the HTML. But, if you have the code in the head (it’s only one line, and is more efficient embedded anyway), then the cookie actually gets set immediately, before the rest of the HTML has finished being loaded.
Try it – go visit http://adaptive-images.com on a large screen. If you see large images it worked, because if there isn’t a cookie set it delivers the mobile resolution, which are much smaller.
Here an alternative solution for adaptive images: http://litesite.org/holygrail/stage2/