I'm going to rant some moar about mod_pagespeed,
. It's pretty neat really, I've been tweaking a few more settings because I'm pedantic.
I tried one feature, 'lazyload_images', which would only fetch images as they become visible. One the one side, this would, I think, reduce load times for our bigger articles with a lot of images. However, when I tried it it was a bit jarring; images would pop into view as you scroll down. It probably wouldn't be that bad once the images were in your cache though.
Pages like
the Unused Text series are quite long and are up to 5 MB in size (total, images etc); lazy loading could work for those, I think. But I'm still not sure, I'd have to check GA and determine the average download speed most people have, etc.
One thing I noticed btw is that the images for the Unused Text series are hosted externally, on worldofbits.com or something - this is probably due to those articles also getting published on another site, but still. Do we have backups of those images somewhere, in case that host goes down? Another consequence of that decision is that mod_pagespeed can't optimize the images - and they're each 50 - 100 KB in size, which isn't very optimal.
Anyway. There is another option that will inline low-quality versions of images on first load, then replace them with high-res images. I'm not going to enable that one, it's only really useful for 'first view', and prevents images from popping in while the page loads, but I don't think we really have that problem atm. Maybe for the homepage, but I'd have to simulate slow page speed for that. Actually I just did,
. The images load slowly (top to bottom) atm, but on second load it's not too bad due to caching.
I'm probably being too anal about this stuff,
Edit: There is a small issue where the background color will flash white before turning the regular BG color; this seems to be something WP does, some default style thing. Lemme see if I can fixx, either by editing that config value in WP, or setting a hard bgcolor on the body tag or something.