I wrote a post the other day detailing my adventures with and subsequent complaints of Pandora’s feed/widget creation. However, at the end of it all, I was victorious and the proud new owner of a customized widget showing my bookmarked songs and their album covers…or so I thought.
The nasty surprise
Naturally after working with something like this that tested my patience, I wanted to brag to someone about how awesome I was to get it working. The only person who happened to be online that would have appreciated this was fellow technophile and WordPress-er, Matt Stublefield.
One of the things I love (and hate) about Matt, is how quickly he can identify a critical problem in a setup and waste no time in notifying you about it. I’d like to think that I reciprocate this service to him as well. In this particular instance, he noticed a huge, gaping hole in my awesome Pandora setup:
- Matt Stublefield: Man, 569kb in 14.4 seconds.
- Ryan Burrell: for?
- Matt Stublefield: Your site.
- Ryan Burrell: …there shouldn’t be near that much data
- Matt Stublefield: The Pandora stuff is huge.
- Ryan Burrell: what do you use to do bandwidth profiling?
- Matt Stublefield: Firebug.
- Ryan Burrell: oh lord…I know what it’s doing
- Ryan Burrell: those album images…those are full resolution
Yeah, that’s right. The feed Pandora generates only allows the album art images to be a fixed size…yet the source image they draw from is a full-sized 500 x 433 image. And I’m loading 5 of those at the bottom of my page.
The journey continues
I have no control over the setup of Pandora’s feed generation. And, despite my best efforts, this last little discovery has been the nail in the coffin for using resources straight from Pandora. I mentioned in my previous article about finding this page: rgb255 » Blog Archive » Pandora Widget now also as Plugin. When I had tried working with it before it had caused some plugin conflicts. However, having an extra several hundred kilobytes of image data on my page is inexcusable, so I guess I’ll do some investigation and see if I can get this plugin to work again.
I ended my last article with a plea to Pandora and any other large company serving the web community to please Please PLEASE work to make your resources as standards-compliant and customizable as possible. Just a little more effort on Pandora’s end would have made their feed resources just as exceptional as their music service.
I don’t mean to have eagle eyes that track tiny weaknesses from up to a mile away!
In other news, I kicked my site down to a single post on the front page. First load is down to 22kb and after that it’s only 8kb ^_^
PS April really likes the way your site looks now.