PNG optimizers

These days, one of my main tasks is to reduce the loading time for ForeCite (FC) reader - a web interface which allows users to read and annotate academic papers. I'll write a more thorough introduction about it in my next entries.

Since FC reader needs to display quite a number of PNG images, each image corresponds to a page in a paper. Thus, by reducing the size of the images, I hope to reduce the loading time of FC reader.

What follows are two PNG optimizers I've found out today. Basically, these tools help to recompress PNG image files to a smaller size, without losing any information

• OptiPNG
• PNGout

I've tried to run both and PNGout turns out to perform better than OptiPNG in reducing the image file size, however, it does take longer time to run

Google analytics

To obtain the statistics of ForeCiteNote's traffic, I use Google Analytics(GA) - a free web tracking service offered by Google. In short, GA helps you to know how visitors find your page, how they interact with it and from that information, you may enhance your page to meet the users' need.

You can incorporate GA into your website in 4 simple steps . First of all, you need a Google Account to login to GA. Next, you enter the name of your site and its URL. Then, GA asks you to copy the tracking code which is a javascript snippet into every webpage you want to track immediately before the </body> tag . Finally, check the status of your tracking code to see if it's been successfully installed in your webpage. Note that you may need to wait a day before you can get any data from GA.