Know Your Clouds

A nice little educational resource about clouds (for users) and automated build processes (for me)

This started as a school project in 2011, and the task was to bring it up to date and responsivize it. It was also an experiment in using Grunt to automate tasks for me, following this awesome 24 Ways post by Chris Coyier. I initially dipped my toe in by getting Grunt set up to watch and compile my Sass; but then I went whole hog, using it to concatenate and minify my JavaScript and squash my images as well.

I used low.html, a typical page, as an example. Minifying the JS saved almost 103K. (I typically output Sass with the compressed option, so that was a wash.) A lot of the images were already optimized, but those went on a diet too. The lightbox library I used back then lazily loaded the full-size images – something I may or may not have appreciated at the time – but between all the images on the page, I got a total slim-down of about 28K.

It’s not news that minifying JS and compressing images saves space, of course; but thanks to my new friend Grunt, I was able to do it quickly, painlessly, and automatically.

• Project site
• Code on GitHub