Busy, busy, busy.

December 8, 2014 at 8:41 pm

You might have noticed the post­ing fre­quen­cy here at SpareType has dropped off a bit the last few weeks. Client work has picked up and hope­ful­ly I’ll be able to share some of that soon as items get com­plet­ed. In the mean­time, here’s a huge list of awe­some things from around the Internet that have been col­lect­ing dust in my brows­er tabs. Enjoy!

The State of Web Type — Do you need to know which OpenType fea­tures are sup­port­ed in which browsers? Then here is the Can I Use for typo­graph­ic features.

Do you know how many rules, selec­tors, and dec­la­ra­tions are in your CSS? Maybe you’re curi­ous how many col­ors or font fam­i­lies are hid­den in your style sheets? Plug in your URL or raw code to CSSStats and get the breakdown.

The folks at Tower are cel­e­brat­ing OS X Yosemite with An Illustrated History of Mac OS X. The illus­tra­tions are mar­velous. I think the Lion in the space­ship is my favorite, though Snow Leopard is close too.

Turn sta­t­ic mock­ups into trans­par­ent, float­ing guides with GluePrint.

Just want to code and not worry about web servers, data­bas­es, engines, or deploy­ment? Cactus is a free, sta­t­ic site gen­er­a­tor that com­piles Markdown, SASS, and Coffeescript out of the box. It also auto­mat­i­cal­ly refresh­es your brows­er when you save changes and can deploy to Amazon S3 to make your web­site public.

Flakes is a clean, open source design frame­work for build­ing inter­nal busi­ness appli­ca­tions — think sales lead man­age­ment and inven­to­ry track­ing screens. Just look at this form for enter­ing info.

Flakes Framework Screenshot of Form Entry Screen, Admin UI, CSS framework

How to Make a Performance Budget? What should you be mea­sur­ing, how should you mea­sure it, and what should your goal be in deliv­er­ing the best web­site performance.

DeviantArt has a new brand. I love the write­up about the process, but I’m not entire­ly sold on the logo yet.

Awesome home­page and all-around awe­some web­site by the folks at Underbelly. Really nice touch­es with the URL names.

Underbelly.is - Screenshot of creative agency homepage, blue washed desktop, full screen background

‘Tis the sea­son for cute, wintery-themed hol­i­day icons. Here’s an awe­some free set on Dribbble.

Speaking of the hol­i­days, here’s a Christmas present I would have liked as a child. Typeblocks — maple wood alpha­bet blocks.

Typeblocks - maple wood alphabet blocks, font blocks, laser cut

Finally, let’s wrap the post up with a lit­tle self-promotion. Society6 — which I have some art­work avail­able on — has some great hol­i­day dis­counts going on this week. Be sure to check out my store and pick out any last minute gifts you still need to get.

Analytics, or Is Anybody Reading This?

September 4, 2014 at 10:45 pm

Along with upgrad­ing to WordPress 4.0 today, the lat­est ver­sion of Yoast’s Google Analytics plu­g­in was released with sup­port for Universal track­ing. With every­thing updat­ed and squared away, I took a look at some of the num­bers and decid­ed to share. Click on any chart for a larg­er, eas­i­er to read version.

The Last Month Year over Year

My first snap­shot was a quick look at August 1st — 31st of 2014 and com­pare that to 2013. Over the last month, I’ve launched a redesign and been giv­ing my site more atten­tion as part of my move to free­lanc­ing and being my own boss. With 79% more peo­ple com­ing to my site, I feel great about the growth.

Google Analytics Numbers for August 2014 vs. 2013 - line chart, more users, more readers

But What Content Are They Reading?

Google Analytics - Top 10 Pages Visited for August 2014, table, pageviews, average time on page

Well, their not read­ing the new stuff. Darn. My most pop­u­lar con­tent for the month of August 2014 is older list-style posts that show­case type­faces. These image heavy posts rank well in Google Image search for a wide range of typo­graph­i­cal search terms. The home­page does make a strong show­ing at num­ber two; a free­bie rounds out the top ten. Next ques­tion, does August fit in with what peo­ple have been look­ing at on SpareType this year? The next table is top pages from January 1st, 2014 — August 31st, 2014.

Google Analytics Top 10 Pages for January - August 2014, unique pageviews

Yep, the trend con­tin­ues. The images are dri­ving a bulk of search traf­fic for sin­gle page views. Readers then bounce on out­bound links to where they can buy the fonts. It’s also good to see my free­bie resources in the top ten views for the year. Combined they’ve been down­loaded 491 times.

Year to Date

To fin­ish up this lit­tle peek at the num­bers, I decid­ed to look at January 1st, 2014 — August 31st, 2014 and com­pare it to that same time peri­od last year.

Google Analytics Chart - January 2014 to August 2014 Overview, Year to Date, Year over Year, pageviews, sessions, users, time on site

Again, improve­ment with more new users vis­it­ing the site. Pages per ses­sion and ses­sion dura­tion aren’t great though. It would be nice if peo­ple stuck around and checked the site out a bit. I guess that’s what every web­site owner would like though.

My take­away from glanc­ing at the num­bers is to keep mak­ing con­tent. I need to release more design resources. I need to keep pub­lish­ing posts and build­ing value. People are read­ing — or at least look­ing — at my web­site. I’m not shout­ing into empty space. That’s a good feeling.

What do you think?

Are these num­bers bad / good / meh? Am I read­ing them upside down or inter­pret­ing them wrong? Is there a met­ric you’re curi­ous about that I did­n’t cover? I’d love to hear from all 1479 users who stopped by SpareType last month.

Site Performance Starting Point

August 15, 2014 at 11:00 am

With the redesign this week, I’m shift­ing to a more con­tin­u­ous devel­op­ment process. Tweak, break, fix, rinse, repeat. Before things set­tled too much I want­ed to get a per­for­mance base­line of the new theme in action. You have to have a start­ing point in order to judge improve­ment — so here are the numbers.

Size
in KB		 Requests Empty cache
in seconds		 Primed cache
in seconds		 Cached Size
in KB
Home Page 30.1 10 2.95 2.82 24.6
Blog 210.1 12 4.16 2.69 202.6
Post 1 286.1 23 5.12 3.59 280.4
Post 2 220.9 16 2.79 2.99 220.9

 

Methodology

All num­bers come from Firebug 2.0.3 run­ning on Firefox 31. Times above are the aver­age of three tests for each scenario.

Takeaways

Already on the to-do list is to imple­ment a build process with Grunt. That will take care of low­er­ing the request num­bers once the mul­ti­ple JS and CSS files are com­bined. It should also trim a few kilo­bytes once it ugli­fies everything.

Second, and more impor­tant, is upgrad­ing host­ing. The shared host­ing on Bluehost is great. I’ve never had any prob­lems, tons of fea­tures, and things work won­der­ful for the price. Now that I’m get­ting seri­ous and look­ing at the num­bers, per­for­mance is where you take the hit. Waiting for a response from the serv­er var­ied wild­ly with the quick­est response tak­ing 837 mil­lisec­onds and aver­ag­ing 2.69 seconds.

Not a bad start­ing point but it will def­i­nite­ly get better.

RSS Feed Zero

August 1, 2014 at 3:14 pm

I final­ly sat down today and tack­led my back­log of RSS feeds. There were over 1300 items that have been pil­ing up because of a con­fer­ence and mov­ing. After read­ing head­lines and sort­ing through the riff-raff, I have for you the gems of the last week.

Game About Squares — Simple, min­i­mal­ist brain teas­er of a game

Greater Than or Equal To — Wonderful con­cept for a writer’s web­site, exe­cut­ed perfectly

Some details on Github’s CSS by Mark Otto

Chris Coyier pulls back the cur­tain on Codepen’s CSS

Dave Rupert talks about respon­sive web design bloat, then increas­es his site’s per­for­mance.

Wordmark.it — Have a lot of fonts on your com­put­er? Ever won­der what a word would like in every font loaded on your com­put­er? Boom, prob­lem solved.

VIDE — jQuery plu­g­in for video back­grounds

A visu­al­iza­tion of cre­atives’ salaries from a Designer News survey

Elliot Jay Stocks is con­sol­i­dat­ing his web typog­ra­phy knowledge

A dis­sent­ing opin­ion about Monotype buy­ing FontShop

And we fin­ish with this exple­tive laden video of every Samuel L. Jackson Mother######.