Best Javascript compressor to use

I recently had a relatively large javascript (14KB) that I want to compress down. There are a lot of online JS compressors out there unfortunately not all of them actually work. After testing around a dozen of them I found the best two are JavaScript Utility and Javascript Compressor. JavaScript Utility was able to compress down my code to 5.0KB while Javascript Compressor compressed down to 6.3KB.

While both are good I would recommend using Javascript Utility, not only because it achieved a better compression ratio, but it also has a large number of other JS utilities that are worth using (especially JSLint). The only problem I found is I was only able to get the UTF-8 encoding option to actually run.

How to compare the remote and local versions of a file in Dreamweaver

I was recently faced with working out what had changed in one of my big php files on the remote server (someone naughty had been playing with it). I use Mac OSX Dreamweaver and after a bit of searching around I found the following way to make Dreamweaver easily show you what has changed. This is not really anything major but it might save someone a bit of time.

First download and install TextWrangler. It is free and quite a nice text editing program.

Next open “Preferences” in Dreamweaver and select “File Compare”.

In “File Compare” browse to the “usr/bin/” folder and select “twdiff”.

Press OK and then go back to the main menu.

Open in Dreamweaver the local file in that you want to compare with the remote version. Select “Compare with Remote” from the “File” menu.

TextWrangler will now launch showing you the difference between the local version and the remote version. You can then chose to keep or reject any of the changes.