Since I know a bit about CSS and wanted to customise my bulletin board a bit, I decided to copy the default UBB.x CSS out of somewhere and put it in the "custom stuff to put in HTML header" section. Infopop have put comments and indentation in the CSS to make it easier to read, but the indentation is about 8 spaces per line. By removing all the comments and whitespace (apart from the occasional linefeed) I found I could reduce the size of the CSS info from 4.4KB to 2.6KB, which is a fair saving since it occurs on every page.

I don't know if when you choose not to customise your CSS, the information is included from a file anyway (so no overhead), but in either case this saves people who use custom CSS some bandwidth.

Hello Stephen

The greatest saving would be to pack it up in a file and call it with a link. Then it gets cached after the first time. I always like that technique too because it gets 'head clutter' out of the way.

Remember as well that the UBB.x pages are gzipped at an about 8-1 ratio so the saving isn't perhaps as great as it would appear in raw bandwidth.

Michael Farris
OpenTopic/UBB.x Product Manager

My main reason for always embedding CSS is that I hit a problem with Netscape trying to read an external CSS stylesheet. I'm glad the bulletin board pages are zipped (HTML isn't very efficient), although I have no idea how you tell my browser how to unzip them again!

If you do this then you can't change your Style settings as easily. The CSS is automatically updated with the settings you choose under 'Site-Wide Display'. Any changes you want to make will have to be done manually.

Yeah, the colours form on the style settings page won't work if you have specified your CSS manually. Whether you like doing it this way depends on how happy you are with CSS and RGB hex codes. I've just got a backup of the CSS here (Infopop's + my modifications) that I edit offline and then paste in.

Another interesting thing you can do is change some of the formatting, so in certain places where UBB seems to have an inordinate amount of small-size/bold text, you can get parts of it not to be bold. Try adding

.ip-alt-font b {font-weight:normal}
.ip-alt-font b a {font-style:italic;font-size:20px}

to see the sort of stuff you can change individually.

Incidentally, are all of my pages gzipped when they are sent (my website as well as the UBB)?

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Originally posted by Stephen Brooks:
Incidentally, are all of my pages gzipped when they are sent (my website as well as the UBB)?

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I am almost positive that only UBB.x gzips its pages.

Okay, I'm just trying out a configuration option to activate compression on your non-UBB.x pages. According to Apache, making a file called .htaccess in your site's web root directory and adding to it the line

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

will switch gzipping on. My site went down for maintenance as soon as I did this so I'll probably post again when/if I know it works.

EURK! I don't recommend anyone else doing this because as soon as I uploaded that config, my whole site has gone offline (just a page saying Closed for Maintenance). I don't know if this is my fault (me broken it) or just a bizarre coincedence.

Well the first time I removed that directive from the file, nothing happened, but now when I try it, the site comes back up.

I don't understand why activating compression triggers not a server error page, but an infopop one.