Yesterday I thought it would be a good idea to see just how big an article on my blog was…

Um… 4.5MB for an article about coding? That seems, a bit excessive?

So I went digging in to see what the heck was going on. Over half of that was for simply adding Disqus support. Seriously? Over 2MB for a comment system? And a comment system that can't even properly format posts? WHY?

Alright, so that's gone.

Where's the rest of it? Well… another 400KB or so was for the webfonts that I was using. Do I think the previous font looked better? Yeah. But come one! 400KB for slightly better looking prose. Nope, sorry, gotta go.

Another culprit of wasted space was the "me" picture on the left. It was a PNG file that was roughly 600KB. Yikes! The PNG version is down to 29KB.

After a bit more tweaking, I got the site down to about 360KB (for articles, content with images is obviously larger). This is still stupidly large for what is actually going on. Also, the page load time has gone from 1.42s down to 143ms.

But I still have a bunch of cruft in there. Unfortunately, this last layer, to actually stream-line out, requires a complete rewrite of everything in there.

This is where I have the biggest issue with development today, and it's not just web developers: developers have become complacent in being wasteful for the benefit of their own development ease instead of considerate of the time and resources they are taking from customers. Every article I had on my page was costing you 4MB of bandwidth (minus any local caching). It took me about an hour of time to reduce the size and render time to about 10% of what it used to be.

We should all strive to do much better than we currently are.