…but I’m on an optimization kick and can’t stop talking about it. Hungry Hacker just gobbled down another fistful of slimming pills now in the form of a removed jQuery library from Arthemia. Well that’s not strictly accurate, because Arthemia doesn’t included jQuery by default – the bottom right portion of the footer contains a box that lists the “most popular articles”, which is powered by the WP-PageViews plugin which… you guessed it, uses jQuery.
To me it’s almost a case of “everything looks like a nail” with respect to jQuery – it’s one hell of a fat (cool, but fat) library for just ensuring a script is called without cache control. The same thing could be fixed with a transparent image, or a lightweight home-brew AJAX call-home without the entirety of the library included for every page view.
Disabling this plugin lopped off 25% of the average page’s uncompressed total file size – to be fair, with gzip compression on it was probably closer to about 5KB actually saved (though I have no idea how much jQuery weighs gzipped) but the fact is we saved another HTTP request, and a script request in the <head> of the page no less.
Median page-load times according to the PageSpeed plugin for Firebug look to be between 600ms and 1 second – I think that’s good enough, actually. I just need to think of something to put in the unoccupied territory of every page now, and then I should probably get back to work putting up content.