This is a project from the Udacity Front-End Web Developer nanodegree. This project focused on optimizing an existing web site, and using debugging skills. There are many known bugs in the existing site that need to be fixed in order to make the site run faster and smoother. This repo represents my submission to the project.

You can load the website in two ways:

1. From this GitHub pages - open the website.

2. Download the repo locally - You can either download a zip file from the repo or you can clone the repo onto your local machine. Once downloaded onto your local machine, you can do one of two things to view: -- Open the dist/index.html file that is in the root directory of the repo, with a browser (i.e. Chrome, Firefox). -- Host the files through a local web server, and use your browser to navigate to the local web server. For example, if you have python installed, you can run this command within the dist/ of the repo directory to serve the files:

   python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080 # assuming port 8080 is not used already.
   

   Then you can navigate your browser to localhost:8080/

• The original app created a story details widget for each story when clicked. So, I changed that so that there was only one widget, which got updated with the active story when clicked. This reduced the number of DOM elements significantly, and excess layers.
• Layers (via will-change) were being created for individual elements of the story details widget. I removed the CSS for any children of the story details, and only kept it for the main story details element. This reduced the number of layers.
• Wrapped the loadStoryBatch function with a requestAnimationFrame, to make sure the visuals were being painted at the correct time.
• re-factored the colorizeAndScaleStories function to optimize it, by separating the reading and writing into separate batches, reduced calculations, and reduced the number of stories being work on at one time (only visible items).
• Removed the loop in onStoryData, since the element can be queried directly, without the looping.
• Used CSS transform, instead of javascript for the story details animation.

• Minified CSS with htmlmin to reduce file size
• Minified JS with uglify-js to reduce file size
• Inlined CSS to avoid another round trip with inline-source
• Inlined javascript files namespace.js, app.js and data.js to avoid another round trip with inline-source

Page Speed Insight analysis

Received a performance score of 89 (good)

From Chrome DevTools Performance tab, you can visually see a huge difference between the old and new for both page loading, scrolling and story detail animation. FPS generally average almost double improvement.

Used Gulp to automate the building and common tasks of the website. Includes the following:

• minification of javascript using uglify
• minification of HTML and CSS using htmlmin
• inlining CSS using inline source
• Javascript linting using jshint
• CSS linting using csslint
• moves all assets under the dist/ directory

Gulp dependencies are in the package.json file

You need to install nodejs/npm and gulp first.

To generate distribution, run the following in the root directory of the repo

Install Dependencies

npm install

Generate Distribution

gulp main

You can run individual tasks by replacing main with either html, csslint,js or img The resulting files for distribution will be in the dist/ directory

• Google Page Speed Insights - tool to measure web page performance
• convert - CLI tool to resize and optimize images
• Chrome Dev Tools tips-and-tricks
• Optimizing Performance
• gulp - build/task tool to automate common tasks (i.e. minifications, inlining)
• gulp-htmlmin - tool to minimize the HTML and CSS
• gulp-uglify - tool to minimize the Javascript files
• gulp-inline-source - Tools to inline CSS into the HTML page from gulp
• gulp-csslint - tool to check syntax of CSS from Gulp
• gulp-jshint - tool to check syntax of javascript files from Gulp

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. (See LICENSE.md)

Copyright (c) 2018 Brett Schwarz