As mentioned in my previous post we got a nice white Christmas this year with an impressive amount of snow.  While walking back from the shops i managed to take this picture on my phone:

I hope the snow continues to be with us till the new year. I am hoping to get up north for some snowboarding as the webcams are showing good coverage on the majority of resorts.  I plan on hitting Aviemore, Nevis and Glencoe. Watch this space for pictures :) Have a nice Boxing Day, if you're travelling have a safe journey. 

 If you have any pictures you'd like to share like the above then please comment and leave a link.

 

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Well this morning was a bit of a shock when I looked out the window to find the below:

This was the result of 3 hours of heavy snow. What a day, been out snowboarding, yes, in Dalgety Bay :)

I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Stay safe and to a fabulous 2010.

If you’re on twitter then you may have noticed the #uksnow appear in the trending topic. Watching the trend on twitter or a desktop client isn’t going to do anything for you. However, Ben March has developed the #uksnow Map 2.0 whereby a twitter user can update their status like the following #uksnow EH3 0/10. The status broken down.......

At the end of last month I started working on tweaking my subtext skin so that I can increase my YSlow score. 

What did I do?

1. Merged several css files into one sheet
2. Merged JavaScript files into one file
3. Put items 1/2 files onto a CDN
4. Placed site wide images on a CDN
5. Moved the JavaScript calls to the bottom of the page
6. I also merged xfn icons into one image and used a CSS sprite

Before YSlow:

After making some changes I managed to increase my score by……….

Using the Firefox plug-in httpfox I checked to see what the results were. After removing again web/script resources and Google stuff (total was 24) this is the outcome

Previous totals were Time: 21.202 Sent: 23081 Received: 216529.

After totals are Time: 11.196 Sent: 6066  Received: 133105.

I also reduced the number of http requests from 37 to 13.

I am happy with my score going from F33 to C72. Running the other 2 YSlow tests over my site as the above is YSlow(V1) I get the following results:

• V2 – Grade B score of 80
• Small site or blog – Grade A score of 90

 

What next?

This was a quick experiment on my homepage to see how easy it was to make a small difference.  From what I learned I will be implementing in my new skin hoping to beat the score of 72.  I will also be submitting a patch to the subtext project with the xfn css sprite changes i made.

Resources:

• CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them
• The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials
• Google App Engine

It wasn’t until a friend Simone on twitter stated about how it’d been snowing all night that I suddenly realised, I’ve not checked the weather reports for up north. Yes, this year I am late in checking out my usual winter haunts. Usually I am on top of any sign of snow fall up in the highlands in hope that the season will kick off early. Like the previous posts:

• What a pretty sight... Early Season? - Oct 2008
• Nevis gets some powder - Nov 2007
• Man is it cold – Oct 2006

In between the above posts there have been trips up north and abroad that can be found:

Rest of snowboarding posts

Off I went to http://ski.visitscotland.com to check out some of the web cam pages and what a big surprise I got.

Glencoe

*both images from - http://www.glencoemountain.co.uk/

Cairngorms

both images from - http://www.cairngormmountain.co.uk/snow-sports-at-cairngorm-mountain

Nevis Range

No images available from this month. The last web cam images was uploaded on 8th of last month (time of this post).  These can be found

http://snowsports.nevisrange.co.uk/

 

This weekend will see me putting my boards in for a full service in preparation for what I will hope be a fantastic season. I can’t wait to use my flow bindings again as this year they proved to be a worthy investment, click, click and away you go :)

Other Resources

• Nevis Range on twitter
• Cairngorms on twitter