Mr Branding

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

How to Optimize CSS and JS for Faster Sites

This article was sponsored by Aussie Hosting. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

User experience is the most important factor when it comes to the success of your online venture.

It doesn't matter if you run a niche blog, SaaS site, or an online store. If you somehow manage to botch up your audience's experience, don't expect to convert any of them into paying customers.

The good news is, any brand can methodically improve user experience by narrowing down on specific on-page factors.

Loading speed, for instance, is something that most website owners easily overlook.

According to conversion rate data, increasing your Internet site speed from eight seconds to two seconds may lead to a 74 percent increase in conversion rate.

That means that a slow site could cost you nearly half of your potential customers.

Seeing the Full Picture with PageSpeed Insights

To determine issues on your website that affect loading speed, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights. It's a free tool that automatically scans both the desktop and mobile versions of your site.

PageSpeed Insights

In addition to the issues detected, PageSpeed Insights will also show you a handful of actionable recommendations.

For site owners who never gave any thought to page loading speed, you may encounter the following issues:

PageSpeed Insights

These indicate that your CSS and JavaScript code is slowing your site down. And while it might sound like a job for full-fledged web developers, they're fairly easy to optimize with the help of tools.

Without further ado, here are the steps you need to take to minify your CSS and JavaScript assets.

Determine the Code to be Minified

Code minification is the practice of deleting characters that don't serve any function other than improving readability.

For example, inline comments may help developers comprehend what a particular section of code does. While it's useful for reviewing or debugging, they may also bloat the size of the code.

Minification removes these excess characters — therefore reduces bandwidth usage and boosts page loading speed.

Using PageSpeed Insights, you can easily identify which code requires minification. Simply click "Show how to fix" and follow the path in your CMS (Content Management System) or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client.

Code minification

For example, if your website runs on WordPress, then all of your code should be consolidated in the "Editor" section. This can be found by under the "Appearance" tab from the primary dashboard.

Code minification

Optimizing Your Codes

Now that you've found the code in question, it's time to learn how to minify them.

Perhaps the easiest way to minify your code is to leverage automated tools. When it comes to CSS and JavaScript, some of the best tools for the job are CSS Minifier and JSCompress.

Using CSS Minifier

CSS Minifier is a free and simple tool that automatically compresses CSS assets. All you need to do is paste the code into the input field, set a compression level, and click "Minify."

CSS Minifier

Depending on the size of your code, it may take a few seconds to a minute to minify your code. Your new code can then be copied back into your CMS or FTP client interface.

Important: As a precaution, don't forget to create backups before making any changes in your site's code. Creating offline or cloud-based copies is a straightforward way to do this.

CSS Minifier

To test if your minification worked, go ahead and run another analysis on PageSpeed Insights. The CSS file you recently compressed should no longer appear under the "Minify CSS" details.

CSS Minifier

Using Asynchronous Loading on JavaScript

Compared to CSS, JavaScript is slightly trickier to minify correctly. Before you run your code through JSCompress, consider implementing asynchronous code loading first.

Also referred to as "Lazy Loading" — but in the context of JavaScript, asynchronous loading works by dynamically loading functions.

To use asynchronous loading, just add the "async" tag when calling the .js file. This can be done in your website's HTML source code.

Here's an example on how to do this:

<script src=”yourscript.js” async> </script>

You can refer to this post for more information on how this works and its usage. If you're completely new to HTML, read this beginner's guide until you're comfortable with the basics.

Combining JavaScript Files

Another point worth mentioning when it comes to optimizing JavaScript is to combine files in a single page. Doing so will reduce the number of HTTP requests that the browser makes, which would invariably speed up loading time.

For example, rather than calling multiple .js files in your source code:

Continue reading %How to Optimize CSS and JS for Faster Sites%

by Gary Stevens via SitePoint

#190: Small Tweaks To Make a Huge Impact on Your Site's Accessibility

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Building Games With Python 3 and Pygame: Part 3

Overview

This is part three of a five-part series of tutorials about making games with Python 3 and Pygame. In part two, we covered the TextObject class used to render text on the screen, created the main window, and learned how to draw objects like bricks, the ball, and the paddle.

In this part, we will dive into the heart of Breakout and learn how to handle events, meet the main Breakout class, and see how to move the different game objects.

Handling Events

In Breakout, there are three types of events: key press events, mouse events, and timer events. The main loop in the Game class takes care of the key press and mouse events and delivers them to subscribers (by calling a handler function).

While the Game class is very generic and has no Breakout specific knowledge, the subscription itself and how to handle each event are very specific.

The Breakout Class

The Breakout class is where most of the domain knowledge about the Breakout game is managed. We will meet the Breakout class several times during this series. Here are the lines that register the various event handlers.

Note that all key events for both the left and right arrow keys will go to the same handler method of the paddle.

# Register the handle_mouse_event() method of a button object
self.mouse_handlers.append(b.handle_mouse_event)

# Register the handle() method of the paddle to handle key events
self.keydown_handlers[pygame.K_LEFT].append(paddle.handle)
self.keydown_handlers[pygame.K_RIGHT].append(paddle.handle)
self.keyup_handlers[pygame.K_LEFT].append(paddle.handle)
self.keyup_handlers[pygame.K_RIGHT].append(paddle.handle)

Handling Key Presses

The Game class will call the registered handlers for each key event and pass the key. Note that it doesn't the Paddle class. In Breakout, the only object that is interested in these events is the paddle. When a key is pressed or released, its handle() method is called.

The Paddle doesn't need to know if it was a key down or key up event because it manages the current state through a pair of boolean variables: moving_left and moving_right. If moving_left is True then it means the left arrow key is pressed and the next event will be key up, which will release it. The same goes for the right arrow key. The logic is as simple as toggling these variables in response to any event.

    def handle(self, key):
        if key == pygame.K_LEFT:
            self.moving_left = not self.moving_left
        else:
            self.moving_right = not self.moving_right

Handling Mouse Events

Breakout has a game menu you'll meet soon. The button on the menu handles various mouse events such as movement and clicks (mouse down and mouse up events). In response to these events, the button updates an internal state variable. Here is the mouse handling code:

    def handle_mouse_event(self, type, pos):
        if type == pygame.MOUSEMOTION:
            self.handle_mouse_move(pos)
        elif type == pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN:
            self.handle_mouse_down(pos)
        elif type == pygame.MOUSEBUTTONUP:
            self.handle_mouse_up(pos)

    def handle_mouse_move(self, pos):
        if self.bounds.collidepoint(pos):
            if self.state != 'pressed':
                self.state = 'hover'
        else:
            self.state = 'normal'

    def handle_mouse_down(self, pos):
        if self.bounds.collidepoint(pos):
            self.state = 'pressed'

    def handle_mouse_up(self, pos):
        if self.state == 'pressed':
            self.on_click(self)
            self.state = 'hover'

Note that the handle_mouse_event() method that is registered to receive mouse events checks the type of the event and forwards it to the specific method that handles that event type.

Handling Timer Events

Timer events are not processed through the main loop. However, since the main loop is called every frame, it's easy to check if a certain timed event is due. You will see an example of this later when discussing timed special effects.

Another situation is when we want to freeze the game—for example, when displaying a message that the player should be able to read without distraction. The show_message() method of the Breakout class uses this approach and calls time.sleep(). Here is the relevant code:

import config as c

class Breakout(Game):
    def show_message(self, 
                     text, 
                     color=colors.WHITE, 
                     font_name='Arial', 
                     font_size=20, 
                     centralized=False):
        message = TextObject(c.screen_width // 2, 
                             c.screen_height // 2, 
                             lambda: text, color, 
                             font_name, font_size)
        self.draw()
        message.draw(self.surface, centralized)
        pygame.display.update()
        time.sleep(c.message_duration)

Gameplay

The gameplay part is where the rules of Breakout come to play (see what I did there?). Gameplay is about moving the different objects in response to the events and changing the game state based on their interactions.

Moving the Paddle

You saw earlier that the Paddle class responds to arrow keys by updating its moving_left and moving_right fields. The actual movement happens in the update() method. There is some computation going on here if the paddle is close to the left or right edge of the screen. We don't want the paddle to move beyond the edges of the screen (including a predefined offset).

So if the movement would have taken it beyond the edge, the code adjusts the movement to stop exactly at the edge. Since the paddle is only moving horizontally, the vertical component of the movement is always zero.

import pygame

import config as c
from game_object import GameObject


class Paddle(GameObject):
    def __init__(self, x, y, w, h, color, offset):
        GameObject.__init__(self, x, y, w, h)
        self.color = color
        self.offset = offset
        self.moving_left = False
        self.moving_right = False

    ...

    def update(self):
        if self.moving_left:
            dx = -(min(self.offset, self.left))
        elif self.moving_right:
            dx = min(self.offset, c.screen_width - self.right)
        else:
            return

        self.move(dx, 0)

Moving the Ball

The ball just uses the functionality of the GameObject base class, which moves game objects based on their speed (with horizontal and vertical components). The speed of the ball is determined by many factors in the Breakout class that you'll see soon. Since moving is just adding the speed to the current position, the direction the ball is moving is fully determined by its speed along the horizontal and vertical axes.

Setting the Initial Ball Speed

The ball in Breakout appears out of nowhere at the beginning of the game every time the player loses a life. It just materializes out of the ether and starts dropping either straight down or at a slight angle. When the ball is created in the create_ball() method, it receives a speed with a random horizontal component between -2 and 2 and a vertical component, which is determined in the config.py module (currently set to 3).

    def create_ball(self):
        speed = (random.randint(-2, 2), c.ball_speed)
        self.ball = Ball(c.screen_width // 2,
                         c.screen_height // 2,
                         c.ball_radius,
                         c.ball_color,
                         speed)
        self.objects.append(self.ball)

Conclusion

In this part, we covered event handling such as key presses, mouse movement, and mouse clicks. We also dove into some of the gameplay elements of Breakout such moving the paddle, moving the ball, and controlling the ball's speed.

Remember also to see what we have available for sale and for study in the Envato Market if you're looking to study more Python-related material.

In part four, we will deal with the important topic of collision detection and see what happens when the ball hits various game objects like the paddle, bricks, and even the walls, ceiling, and the floor.

Then we'll turn our attention to the game menu. We'll create custom buttons that we'll use as a menu we can show and hide as necessary.

by Gigi Sayfan via Envato Tuts+ Code

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