Mount Up

## Educate, regulate

I took an unplanned sabbatical from the newsletter last week (*aka* 
flubbed a deadline) and it turns out that though the newsletter may 
stop, the news sure doesn’t! So let’s dig right in.

Google and Udacity have teamed up to produce [an online responsive 
images course](https://www.udacity.com/course/ud882), and it is 
wonderful. There are videos. There are corny jokes. There is a gentle 
learning curve that starts with an introduction to the Chrome dev tools 
and ends with a fully-responsive blog that incorporates all of the 
myriad respimg use-cases. There are [interactive quizzes that you 
complete in-browser via the dev 
tools](http://udacity.github.io/responsive-images/examples/srcsetAndSizes/index-quiz1.html). 
To date 1,528 people have signed up for the course, and if you or anyone 
you know wants to learn respimg from the ground up, you should, too.

Perhaps reading’s your thing? Jason Grigsby has been publishing a 
superb series of blog posts titled [Responsive Images 
101](http://blog.cloudfour.com/responsive-images-101-definitions/) which 
— in Jason’s clear, concise, and friendly style — introduce each 
piece of the respimg puzzle in perfectly 
[grok](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok)-able chunks.

Hate videos *and* the written word? Never fear — Jason was just on 
[episode 99 of The Web Ahead podcast](http://thewebahead.net/99), 
talking through the history, use-cases, and implementation-nitty-gritty 
of respimg with host Jen Simmons.

Watch, read, listen, and most importantly, do. ’Tis the year of 
implementing respimg. Let’s!

([The Guardian](http://www.theguardian.co.uk) — with their 378 million 
monthly pageviews — [just 
did!](https://twitter.com/patrickhamann/status/577831047964028928))

## Implement, represent

[Picturefill](https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill) was just updated 
to [version 
2.3](https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill/releases/tag/2.3.0). My 
favorite new thing: Picturefill now handles intrinsic densities the same 
way that the native implementations do. So even if you aren’t 
explicitly sizing your image via CSS, it’ll appear the same whether 
the respimg functionality is native or polyfilled. There’s more to the 
release than that, of course — check out the [beta’s 
changelist](https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill/releases/tag/2.3.0-beta) 
for more details.

Speaking of updates, [the official Wordpress respimg 
plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ricg-responsive-images/) was [just 
updated](https://github.com/ResponsiveImagesCG/wp-tevko-responsive-images/releases/tag/2.2.0), 
too. The new version uses the aforementioned Picturefill 2.3 and — in 
accordance with the recently-changed spec — always supplies a `sizes`.

And hey, do you use Django? Use 
[this!](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-responsive-images)

How about ImageMagick? Dave Newton just published the slides from his 
[talk at the Toronto Web Performance 
Group](https://speakerdeck.com/newtron/using-imagemagick-to-resize-your-images-webperfto), 
wherein he details the copious research that went into his incredible 
and indispensable [Grunt-respimg 
plugin](https://www.npmjs.com/package/grunt-respimg). Favorite slide: 
[the `liquid-rescale` nightmare horror 
owl](https://speakerdeck.com/newtron/using-imagemagick-to-resize-your-images-webperfto?slide=37).

If you’re in Toronto and missed it, Dave will be presenting his 
ImageMagick talk again at the [GTA PHP User Group on April 
7th](http://www.meetup.com/GTA-PHP-User-Group-Toronto/events/221364819/) 
and at [Full Stack Toronto on April 
8th](http://www.meetup.com/full-stack-to/events/221499929/). And if 
you’re in Utah (which place — excepting their big lakes and and 
upcomming Dave Newton talks — is unlike Toronto in every concievable 
regard), Dave will be [talking about Responsive Images 
generally](http://www.openwest.org/schedule/#talk-22) at the OpenWest 
Conference in Provo on May 7th.

Speaking of talks, Yoav ran through his [legendary slide 
deck](http://yoavweiss.github.io/smashingconf_oxford/#/) at SmashingConf 
Oxford a couple of weeks ago. [Here are some 
sketchnotes](https://twitter.com/daigen/status/577816047383789568). 
[Moar 
sketchnotes](https://twitter.com/elisabethirg/status/577818850185605120)! 
Video soon, presumably.

And while we’re on the topic of Yoav, the off-main-thread, 
pre-parser-friendly CSS tokenizer that he wrote for `picture` and 
`sizes` has evolved into it’s final form as [the new CSS parser for 
all of 
Blink](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/r9bthijsX3A/mlJ9xc8yJCQJ). 
It brings an enormous 25% (!) layout-performance improvement to Blink 
users everywhere. I try not to trot this out very often, but: [not bad 
for a community group](http://w3cmemes.tumblr.com/post/23122022271).

See you in a couple of weeks!

—eric