Today I learned a lesson that made me feel pretty foolish. I’ve been working towards practicing what I preach, abandoning long-used commercial software packages like photoshop and word for open source alternatives. I’ll get around to writing about that eventually. I figured the same should apply to file formats, so when I redesigned my site I started using .png instead of jpeg files. This is why the header graphics were taking so long to load – some of them were as large as 320k. This was driving me nuts and several of you have commented on it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to optimize PNG files, never bothering to read any actual documentation of course, and never making any significant headway. I tried a variety of tools on mac, win32 and linux (pngout.exe, AdvanceComp, optiPNG, PNGCRUSH, plus several others), all without much luck – at best I was shaving a few k of the files, not the 30-50% reduction I was hoping to see. Finally I headed over to wikipedia and read up on the png file format and discovered I was operating under a misapprehension the entire time. PNG is for replacing GIFs, not jpegs. 10 minutes later I had a collection of header graphics that were literally 1/10th their previous size. So. Apologies for the crappy website performance, it’s fixed now. At least some of you may find the links to the png optimization tools useful, if you’re not already on a CS version of photoshop any of the above will do a superior job optimizing your pngs, and most of them have compiled binaries for multiple operating systems, as well as GUI’s.