Remi Andre

I’m sure many of you — this site gets like eight hits a day after all — have mucked around trying to figure out some of the mechanics behind the site. Anything else would be a bit silly!

As many others have started doing, I have started moving away from using standalone images to sprites. In other words, instead of having one file per image, I have gathered a bunch of images into one file. It’s still a work in progress, but a good example is the Twitter thingy up in the left corner. It’s all in one file.

There are a few advantages doing this. First of all you reduce HTTP requests, which is a pretty big deal for sites like Yahoo! and Google and sites that gets eight daily visitors. I’ve also found it helpful in terms of editing, as well as adding “states” to an image. (Like the Twitter icon which has a default state and a hover state.)

The disadvantage? Photoshop doesn’t exactly optimize PNGs in any fantastic way, but run the file through PngThing and things will look better.

So I like sprites. They make sense. And they remind me of the Amiga!