The other day we implemented gzip and that seems to have made a big difference to the website. At the same time I also upgraded the download scripts for member icons, hub icons, and member files so that they could return a 304 when appropriate.

Once the new search goes live many of the pages will also be serving more compressed HTML by yanking out useless whitespace; I may try to shoehorn that optimization into more of the pages before we take it live. Later on I'd like to work out minifying the CSS as well, which should be simple enough since the main CSS file we use is generated from a master on an as-needed basis. Although, minifying the CSS probably won't reap too much benefit since it's cacheable. Serving the CSS used on member blogs as a separate file would also be helpful; the only trick is we'd need to store some kind of date for its last modification so caching would work correctly.

One of the projects I have in mind as well is no longer inlining a lot of our JavaScript (particularly the bits we use for Ajax), and instead relying on static files to serve those. I've been learning jQuery and intend to start implementing that in various places as time permits, particularly in replacing the homebrew fader on the hub pages with something using the jQuery framework. I'd actually like to spruce up our thumbnail viewer as well, and give screenshots a proper image gallery to work with, stuff like that. Also I think the reference pages might benefit from some sprucing up as far as expandable/collapsible trees; I'd go as far as loading content via Ajax but there we run into the browser history problem, which presently has no optimum solution.