This is just a short post to draw your attention to a sweet tool I've just discovered: PNGGauntlet. It runs on Windows using the .NET 4 framework and is as easy to use as you could possibly wish. Also: it's completely free to use. Convert Your Existing PNGs For starters, we'll just convert some existing PNGs – can't really do any harm with that. In the Open File dialog, there's an option to filter for only .png files. You can choose many of them at once: If you provide an Output directory, the optimized files will be written to that destination. But: the tool also has the option to overwrite the original files, which is awesome if you use some kind of source control (and thus have a backup) and just want to get the job done. During my first run, using the 8 processing threads my CPU has to offer, … … I got savings from 3% to 27%: PNGGauntlet also tells me, that in total I saved 4,52 KB. If those were all images on your web site, that would be a not so bad improvement, especially when you get it investing about 2 min of your time and no extra expenses! Real Savings Running PNGGauntlet on the sprites that we use for Camping.Info, we were really surprised: out of 172 KB it saved us over 31%, a whole 54 KB! Now that's an improvement that on a slightly slower connection will already be noticeable. We'll definitely check the rest of our images for more savings. Convert Other Image Formats You can also choose to change your images format to PNG if you're in the mood. I tried converting all GIFs in the Orchard CMS Admin theme to PNGs and went from a total of 24 KB for 20 files to less than 17 KB with no loss of quality – an over 30% saving! Just beware that you'll need to change the file references in your project to pick up the new PNGs. Roundup Easy, fast and cheap (as in free) image optimization doesn't have to be magic anymore – today anyone can do it. Check out PNGGauntlet to try for yourself. There's really no excuse not to!

These are just quick notes from one of the sessions at the Orchard Harvest conference currently taking place in Amsterdam. Fluid Grids bootstrap-responsive SimpleGrid 1140Grid FooTable hides columns, shows content in expandible elements Fluid Fonts FitText: fittextjs.com makes text fit into header elements SlabText adjusts text sizes to make page look beautiful Toggle navigation using Twitter bootstrap: put .nav-collapse and .collapse on the nav element Frameworks Foundation (uses SASS) INK Pure by Yahoo: new, small - 5KB