Category: TallyStick

“Go Faster” Websites – Introducing Minify

We’ve been minifying and bundling CSS and JS for years to ensure quick page loads of the applications we build. We’ve now generalised, documented and packaged the tool we use for this and released it under a BSD license so others can benefit.

Most web developers know that including lots of JS and CSS files in their sites slow page load times down. Most also know that these files should be minified and bundled into one file on production sites. Most developers don’t do this though. It’s a lot of extra steps in putting your new changes live.

Also, using CDNs or setting expiry times into the future for mostly static files such as CSS and JS also significantly improves page load as clients will grab these files once and use their local cache until their expire. This also poses issues for web developers that is easily overcome by versioning these files – literally adding a version number to the bundles – for example min.bundle-v6.css would be version 6 of the CSS minified and bundled file.

We’ve been doing both of these for a long time with the sites we build. We’ve now generalised, documented and packaged the tool we use for this and released it under a BSD license so others can benefit. See our page on GitHub to download this tool and for examples of its use:

https://github.com/opensolutions/Minify

This tool will:

  • automatically find all CSS/JS files in a given directory named xxx-blah.css where xxx is a three digit ordering / sequence number;
  • minify these files and create a single file bundle including them in the correct order;
  • automatically generate template include files allowing production / development mode (i.e. use individual CSS/JS or bundles based on an application option);
  • versioning for those using CDNs, future expiry dates, etc to ensure clients load fresh JS/CSS bundles.

If you use it, please drop us a note to let us know how you get on! 

We’ve Just Launched TallyStick

TallyStick allows you to focus on what you love to do while it takes care of tracking and accumulating the time you spend on projects. As of today, TallyStick is live and open for business. Please sign up, take advantage of the one month’s free trial (with no credit card details required) and tell us what you think.

[TallyStick Logo]

Overt at Open Solutions, we manage networks, build Internet infrastructure, consult and develop web applications for many customers. Tracking the time our engineers spent on different projects – especially those on the front line hopping from customer to customer – was becoming an issue.

And we had enough. So we built TallyStick. Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention.

We believe in web applications that are simple, beautiful and functional. And after an exhaustive search, we couldn’t find one to fit our needs… so we built it. And who better to build a time tracking application for IT and other consulting professionals than those same professionals!

TallyStick allows you to focus on what you love to do while it takes care of tracking and accumulating the time you spend on projects. We believe it’s simple, efficient and quick. And we hope you agree.

As of today, TallyStick is live and open for business. Please sign up, take advantage of the one month’s free trial (with no credit card details required) and tell us what you think.

Also, all users signing up during the beta period will receive a lifetime discount of 10% on that account!