There are dozens of new web based applications being launched every day. Most are moderately useful, but it’s rare that I actually need to use one. After playing with them for a while, I normally abandon them and go back to the core tools I use to get things done.

Well, I found one that’s going right into my toolset: smush.it, the image optimisation web application.

I recently read yet another one of those posts that list free web based applications that you must use! There are too many of these posts going around to keep track of. You see the same applications listed again and again and the lists grow longer and longer. Tiresome, but I still read them!

I’d seen smush.it mentioned before, but on this particular day, I decided to click through and check it out.

To be honest, I was skeptical before I tried it. I thought I knew a bit about balancing quality and size for web images. I use Adobe Fireworks CS3, which is pretty good at creating images optimised for the web. So, when I tried running smush.it on my blog’s header image, I wasn’t expecting much.

Results time: smush.it reduced my header image from 57.3KB to 46.7KB. That’s a saving of about 19%!

Here’s the original 57.3KB file created in Fireworks (click to open):

And here’s the 46.7KB smushed image (click to open):

You can guess which ones up there in the page header now!

When I open the smushed image in Fireworks and save it again, it goes back to 57.3KB. That’s for a flattened PNG24 image (same as the smushed image). Whatever Fireworks is adding, it must be pretty big! The only visible difference I can see is that the smushed image is 96dpi, while the original is 71dpi.

I also tried smushing some other images and only got a saving of around 2%, but every little bit counts and if you can occasionally chop 19% off an image, then it’s well worth running. I’ll be a regular user of smush.it from now on.

I optimised the image via the smush.it site, but they’ve also got a Firefox extension (or bookmarklet for other browsers) that will smush all the images on a web page and provide you with them in a zip file for you to download!

Who’s behind this new web 2.0 offering? Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan, who are part of the of the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! (the team responsible for YSlow). No wonder it’s good!

Anyone else out there had any success optimising images using smush.it? Matt Mullenweg, if you happen to come across this, smush.it can reduce your main header image by 6.45KB (or 4.81%). Happy smushing everyone!

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a new social news site for WordPress, called WPVote. I’ve been using the site for a couple of days and while the concept is great, the quality of entries are poor at this early stage.

I’m a big believer in the idea of a social news site for WordPress. It’s a great way of pooling together all of the WordPress related posts out there, making it easy for people to find quality information about WordPress.

The Published News section should be the most valuable list of WordPress related articles around. Unfortunately however, to be quite frank, there’s a lot of crap in the Published News section at the moment.

There are the obligitory Top WordPress Plugins Lists that don’t add anything new (and seem to miss many of the essential plugins to boot), generic How To Blog posts with only a tenuous link to WordPress, and posts that don’t really help. For example, one post includes the point:

If you have added a new feature to your WP blog by writing some PHP code that executes SQL queries; make sure that you minimize the load on the server.

If you know what that means, you probably don’t need to be told. If you don’t know what that means, this doesn’t help you at all! If it had a link to a site that told you how to minimise the load on the server, then it would add value. Without such a link, it’s useless.

I won’t link to these entries here, as I’m not having a go at individuals and don’t want to single anyone out, but posts such as this don’t belong in the Published News section.

Now, I’m not saying that these articles are all bad (or that mine are better), or that there aren’t top quality posts there as well (see Perishable Press’ excellent and original article on .htaccess rules for permalinks), or that this doesn’t happen on other social news sites.

I’m not even saying that the poor quality entries shouldn’t be on WPVote. Of course they’re entitled to be! I just want to see better quality in the Published News section. How do we get that?

We all need to get behind WPVote. Submit quality WordPress articles when you find them. Vote on entries in the Upcoming News section. Add comments. Spread the word about WPVote, so the community grows.

I know this post sounds harsh, but it’s a call to action. I believe WPVote can be truly great – but the only way that will come to pass is if we all get behind it. Let’s make WPVote great!