New Application – YUI Compressor Automator

December 13, 2009

I just wrote a wrapper application for Yahoo’s excellent CSS and JS minifyer YUI Compressor.

YUI Compressor Automator by Dan Wellman

YUI Compressor is a command-line tool that allows you to minify one .css or one .js file at a time, reducing the filesize (quite drammatically in some cases) and increasing the performance of your site for first-time visitors (repeat visitors will already have these files in their cache).

My application wraps the YUI Compressor in a visual GUI, shielding you from the command-line scaryness that would otherwise ensue (ok, CLI’s are nice and friendly once you’ve used them a few times, but a lot of non-developers shy away from them). To minify files you just select them in Windows Explorer and drag them into the application window. The application then spits the files out into a folder on your desktop.

This means that minifying files is much faster because you don’t have to type anything, and it also means that you can minify whole batches of files at once :D

I wrote the application using VB.NET so at this point it only runs on Windows machines.

Download the application installer. The installer features everything you need including the original YUI Compressor CLI application. If you have not used the CLI version (or other Java-based JAR apps) before you may need to add data to your Windows class path in order to make it work.

For more information, see the Yahoo documentation for YUI Compressor

5 Responses to “New Application – YUI Compressor Automator”

  1. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by YUI Library and Eric Miraglia, Dan Wellman. Dan Wellman said: drag and drop, batch capable YUI compressor: http://www.danwellman.co.uk/new-application-yui-compressor-automator/ enjoy :D [...]

  2. Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by danwellman: drag and drop, batch capable YUI compressor: http://www.danwellman.co.uk/new-application-yui-compressor-automator/ enjoy :D…

  3. I really liked reading your post!. Quallity content. With such a valuable blog i believe you deserve to be ranking even higher in the search engines :). Check out the link in my name. That links to a tool that really helped me rank high in google. This way even more people can enjoy your posts and nothing beats a big audiance ;)

  4. Mr Twitter says:

    It’s always the simple ideas like this that do well. 15 years of being a software engineer and the command line still scares me!

  5. Dan Wellman says:

    Love the command line! This app helps with a particular work-flow, and is convenient, but command-line = automation, automation = more time doing kick-ass stuff and less time doing manual sucky stuff ;)

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