Warehousing Images?

General Discussion
1

In RW it is best practice to warehouse images for your webpages.

Is the same thing true with Blocs?

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What do you mean by warehousing images? (Was never a RW user)

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You basically keep all of your images stored on your server, because if you use the same image(s) a lot, warehousing will speed up your page loads by caching those images for you.

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Warehousing is a term that seems to be unique to RW users, but you can do exactly the same thing in Blocs by going to the asset manager and selecting the option to add a hosted asset or indeed the bulk alternative. Copy paste the url(s) from the server via your FTP app and you are good to go. Remote assets appear with a little cloud on them to show they are hosted remotely.

I do this all the time as a former RW user. Just like RW you will will find there are a few brics (stacks) where you have to add them locally, but these are rare.

Generally speaking I use remotely hosted (warehoused) images in Blocs for the same reasons as I did in RW. Remote hosting makes site updates quicker because you are not uploading images and videos every time.

I don’t think Blocs suffers a performance issue like RW does if you choose to add them locally. If I look in the export folder there are never multiple examples of the same file, which I think was a Stacks thing. It’s been a while now since I used RW and I always used remote hosting, so I don’t have any projects I could check for that.

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In that case. No I just embed all my images in the project. Works well.

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Blocs has a pretty flexible set up for managing assets.

You can link to them locally, embed them into a single Blocs file or load them direct from a server.

Loading them from the server is what you are looking for, click the + button in the Asset Manager and select add hosted asset :+1:

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@Norm I think the original question was more related to the “best practice” of storing asset files on the server rather than adding locally. From memory, multiple occurrences of the same file used in RW would result in each one generating a different file name if added locally, so rather than fetching from the browser cache it would look for a different image file every time. I think this was a foible of Stacks that Blocs doesn’t suffer from.

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Interesting.

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Oh I see, that sounds messy.

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Oh it IS :grin:

Like a lot of people my plan is to move all of my sites to Blocs, and as a newbie to the program I want to develop good habits from the ground up.

THANKS guys for explaining the differences between RW and Blocs. I appreciate it.

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When it comes to images - loading speed is the key. A lot of people use Image CDN’s like Cloudinary or Imagekit to store all their images and videos. This offers a way to easily organize, store, and load images to your website in a much faster format. If you are migrating away from RapidWeaver anyways (something I am doing right now as well), look into using a CDN for assets like this, it will make any future changes easier, and produces faster websites.

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It does not follow that using a CDN is automatically faster for loading images and video. This needs to be tested with much depending on the origin server and where visitors are based. By default using a CDN requires a callout to an external server, which induces delay that will not necessarily be made up by the CDN.

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Actually there is plenty of evidence that using a quality CDN for images, speeds things up in most cases. This is generally because they are using more servers than a typical hosting company, which in a lot (most?) cases puts them geographically closer to the end user. Quality of hosting does play a big role here, are you using “shared” hosting? “Dedicated Servers”? “VPS Hosting”? But regardless, using a CDN is also putting less stress on your host to serve everything.

Here are a few very credible sources, and what they say:

There is a ton more where those came from - just Google it.

Going back to the original question here - it is generally best practice to have your images stored online. using a CDN for your images and video is just a next level implementation of this practice.

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Yeah, I’ve tested this stuff myself on my own sites for many years. I know when it makes sense and when it doesn’t.

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For me a CDN’s is cost prohibitive. Luckily as mentioned you can still get a decently fast website experience without a CDN. One reason to switch from Rapidweaver to Blocs, is because Blocs is so much faster. As Norm mentioned, I will load the images on the server and monitor webpage loading from there.

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Blocs definitely has a better file structure, and produces code that makes webpages load way faster than what RapidWeaver does out of the box. But using basic CDN’s can also be free.

  • I use a free Cloudflare CDN for every website I build - RapidWeaver/Blocs/Wordpress. Just setup each account on its own email address (usually a client one). This adds, speed & security to every website.
  • I have also used Cloudinary & Imagekit “Free plans” for a couple of image heavy websites as well - the “free” tiers are more than enough for smaller websites.
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I have used Cloudflare, both free and paid, including some of the fancy features like Railgun. I’ve run dedicated severs, VPS, shared and cloud. One site was directly accessible via the O2 portal with access to 12 million users at the time.

It’s just not true that Cloudflare always makes a site faster, but I guarantee it makes it trickier to maintain and troubleshoot if problems occur. At the moment I have a couple sites on Cloudflare, but most are not. It depends on the usage and needs to be tested.

18

It is, was. Until recently RW/Stacks had/has a horrible way of handling images. Coming from a background where everything was kept in an assets folder on the server, when I first used RW I couldn’t quite believe people used resources.

If you added an image to resources, then used it five times on the same page, the browser say each instance of that image as a different image, so downloaded it five times. Plus, the filename was changed to something like 445mf222357ew6685rfghjd75hdt78jfr53fhy.jpg. And if I recall correctly any tags were pulled too.

I was used to “warehousing” (RW term for asset folder) so just carried on that way. But most didn’t. Indeed most of the early image stack and even some frameworks didn’t actually support warehousing! “Hello, 1998 is on the phone, it wants its workflow back”. :wink:

I think Stacks 4 has fixed this problem now, not sure how or if it works well, I still “warehouse” everything. Always have, always will.

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Agree. Some time back I had issues with some sites, the server guy I used at the time suggested Cloudfare would fix things, so implemented it. Disaster. The sites slowed down, the problems remained and a load of new ones got added thanks to CF. I won’t go near it now.

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Thanks guys for the warning about Cloudflare.