Handygeek

Since my Handyman web page mentions my geek skills and I am in geek mode today, today's post is going that direction.
File sizes ----
I was looking at a site I may be doing some work on and one page was a picture gallery. It took 30 seconds to download. Now I know 30 seconds doesn't seem that long, right? OK, for the next 30 seconds, do nothing but look at your watch or computer clock if you have seconds turned on. No cheating, 30 seconds. Seems longer now doesn't it. It had 18 pictures and 18 tumbnails. Just the pictures, 180k each, add up to 3200k. That takes about 30 seconds to download on my dsl. Here is a head to head quality comparison. The top picture is 39k and the bottom one is 2200k. I just did an impartial survey and 5 year olds and 8 year olds both prefer the top picture for speed and quality.
Checking the size of your pictures is easy. PC users right click, Mac users CTRL click and look at properties. Anything over 100k on a page for a single photo that just gets viewed on a monitor is probably a bigger file than it needs to be.
When I first started doing websites I made a huge mistake, and it turned out to be wrong on many levels. Someone gave me a disc of MS Word files and wanted me to turn them into a website. I'm looking at the menu item that says "Save as Web Page" and I thought -- this is easy. What I ended up with was this, 20 pages of code. A similar page made with Adobe Golive ( like Dreamweaver) was only 5 pages. That's 4 times as large and 4 times as long to load. If that wasn't enough the pages were pracically impossible to edit. (move, resize pictures, adjust text sizes.)
So . . . keep it simple, small and quick.

Welcome seminoleheights

Well, David put a mention of this blog on the Seminole Heights blog on Saturday. Saturday I had 3 visitors, Sunday I had 31. My posts will be a bit sporadic, but comments and emailed questions will get a response, possibly in the form of a post. I certainly don't have any problem giving free advice. Most of the time I even know what I am talking about.
So if you are renovating or just have the occasional home repair, drop me a line or check back now and then. I'll try to keep you some what informed and entertained. I will try to remember not to try to be funny if I am writing in the morning. According to my wife/best friend, I'm not funny until at least 10 am.

More later
Mike

Followup: Plaster repair

The National Park Service has published 40 of their briefs on Historic Restoration online as a companion to their printed materials.
The main National Park Service "briefs" link is
http://www.cr.nps.gov/hps/tps/briefs/presbhom.htm
There are some interesting articles there for the Historic restorer.
One of the things that I ran into (again more research needed) is that elastomeric paint is considered to be an accepted encapsulant for lead based paint if it has a 20 year warranty.