This article by Addy Osmani on Essential Image Optimization now has me digging tonight’s rabbit hole. It’s a fun read that current web developers should refresh on.

As a web designer/developer who’s been building for the web since the nineties, I’ve been through the various concerns that used to bother us in getting the job done. Web standards was of course a major concern back then, with browsers trying to outdo each other with supposed innovations. Zeldman and the WaSP were my go-to reading on these topics, and the web wouldn’t be what it is now if not for them. Browser technology convergence led to initiatives like Browse Happy, which then allowed us all to focus on building websites and experiences that pushed the capabilities of the web.

These thoughts crossed my mind because I’ve been busy trying to manage a WordPress-powered website which had its usual contributors uploading unreasonably large images. Most were PR photos in the ~20MB range, and a lot them unnecessarily distributed in PNG format. They’d upload these images to a WP blog and assume the best—because that’s the behavior reinforced by Facebook/Twitter and similar platforms that masked the bandwidth and disk usage concerns from the users.

For now, the nuclear option is to simply use ImageOptim on the contents of wp-content/uploads/ after creating backups. Long-term though, my plan is to implement offloading for my clients’ hosted WP websites, moving media files to object storage like Amazon S3 or my cost-effective favorite, Backblaze B2. Pairing this with nginx rewrite rules to serve media from the external store while caching locally for a length of time should do the trick, and I’m sure others have already implemented a similar solution.

But here’s my short list of tips, for anyone publishing on the web:

• JPGs are best used for photographic images—yes, photos.
• PNGs are great for retaining image information, but they’re always too big when used for photographic data. Save your disk space and everyone’s bandwidth, please.
• Resize images for the right purpose and medium, and save it in a web-optimized format that’s appropriate for the information and color detail.

Earlier today, Hana had the boys work on a mini-project to commemorate Ninoy Aquino’s death anniversary. We also had them watch a few documentaries on his life, because we’ve always felt that kids should grow up knowing their heroes. And the job of introducing them to personalities they should look up to should not fall on schools alone—parents should let children know about history without the sanitized versions people peddle these days.

Curiously, Kuya Mikku chose to write down this inspiring quote:

The only advice I can give you: live with honor and follow your conscience.

For me though, I find this line attributed to Ninoy to be his poetic best:

A time comes in a man’s life when he must prefer a meaningful death to a meaningless life.

He lived—and died—guided by that exact thought. If only Filipinos lived with as much love and sacrifice for the Philippines.

The first few months of 2020 was marked by news of a weird respiratory condition hospitalizing hundreds of people in China. It’s safe to say the rest of that year doesn’t need much of an explanation.

In 2016, pretending to be like the cool kids, I tried to join in on the a-photo-a-day trend on instagram. But to appear much cooler, instead of it being a #project365, it will end up being a #project366 for falling on a leap year!

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t sustain the grind of daily posting. Tragically though, I got much more drama than I could’ve imagined. My mom passed away.

But life is not always doom and gloom. In 2012, we got married. We’ve been blessed with two wonderful boys who keep us hopeful in this crazy world. No honest married person would say that married life is easy, but I’d say that we’re happy. There’s always room for a little more comfort and less worries, but happiness coexists despite uncertainties.

Scrolling through this blog’s archives for 2004 entries would show how much I wrote back then, for both link sharing and actual personal writing. It was then a pre-Facebook era and people genuinely commented on each others’ blog posts, while sharing our personal homepages (and unfiltered email addresses!). I miss those names and the real people behind them, many of which I’ve had the pleasure to get to know IRL. My most consequential open-source code iPAP had its first release that same year, before winning (and giving me some PH internet cred) in the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards, but I digress.

2004 had its own set of drama, too—the kind that people used to read personal blogs for.

And since I’m just allowing myself to ramble and name personal events that fall on leap years, I shouldn’t skip both 1992 and 1996 since they mark important educational milestones, especially in the Pisay context which I associate myself with—sometimes maybe too excessively.

So what’s the point of this post?

In 2024, I’m allowing myself to go on a ride again. There are no guarantees, but I’ll keep it going forward and up the best I can. And I hope to write often as I go about it. Let’s go take a leap!

1st of #100DaysToOffload

(Please pardon how badly this post has turned out. It appears like a very incoherent live draft because it really was. We’ll get better.)