Tags: ideo

I wrote yesterday about how messing about on your own website can be a welcome distraction. I did some tinkering with adactio.com on the weekend that you might be interested in.

Let me set the scene…

I’ve started recording and publishing a tune a day. I grab my mandolin, open up Quicktime and make a movie of me playing a jig, a reel, or some other type of Irish tune. I include a link to that tune on The Session and a screenshot of the sheet music for anyone who wants to play along. And I embed the short movie clip that I’ve uploaded to YouTube.

Now it’s not the first time I’ve embedded YouTube videos into my site. But with the increased frequency of posting a tune a day, the front page of adactio.com ended up with multiple embeds. That is not good for performance—my Lighthouse score took quite a hit. Worst of all, if a visitor doesn’t end up playing an embedded video, all of the markup, CSS, and JavaScript in the embedded iframe has been delivered for nothing.

Meanwhile over on The Session, I’ve got a strategy for embedding YouTube videos that’s better for performance. Whenever somebody posts a link to a video on YouTube, the thumbnail of the video is embedded. Only when you click the thumbnail does that image get swapped out for the iframe with the video.

That’s what I needed to do here on adactio.com.

First off, I should explain how I’m embedding things generally ‘round here. Whenever I post a link or a note that has a URL in it, I run that URL through a little PHP script called getEmbedCode.php.

That code checks to see if the URL is from a service that provides an oEmbed endpoint. A what-Embed? oEmbed!

oEmbed is like a minimum viable read-only API. It was specced out by Leah and friends years back. You ping a URL like this:

http://example.com/oembed?url=https://example.com/thing

In this case http://example.com/oembed is the endpoint and url is the value of a URL from that provider. Here’s a real life example from YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eiqhVmSPcs

So https://www.youtube.com/oembed is the endpoint and url is the address of any video on YouTube.

You get back some JSON with a pre-defined list of values like title and html. That html payload is the markup for your embed code.

By default, YouTube sends back markup like this:

<iframe
width="480"
height="270"
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-eiqhVmSPcs?feature=oembed"
frameborder="0
allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
allowfullscreen>
</iframe>

But now I want to use an img instead of an iframe. One of the other values returned is thumbnail_url. That’s the URL of a thumbnail image that looks something like this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/hqdefault.jpg

In fact, once you know the ID of a YouTube video (the ?v= bit in a YouTube URL), you can figure out the path to multiple images of different sizes:

• 120 × 90: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/default.jpg
• 320 × 180: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/mqdefault.jpg
• 480 × 360: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/hqdefault.jpg
• 1280 × 720: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/maxresdefault.jpg

(Although that last one—maxresdefault.jpg—might not work for older videos.)

Okay, so I need to extract the ID from the YouTube URL. Here’s the PHP I use to do that:

parse_str(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY), $arguments);
$id = $arguments['v'];

Then I can put together some HTML like this:

<div>
<a class="videoimglink" href="'.$url.'">
<img width="100%" loading="lazy"
src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/'.$id.'/default.jpg"
alt="'.$response['title'].'"
srcset="
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/'.$id.'/mqdefault.jpg 320w,
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/'.$id.'/hqdefault.jpg 480w,
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/'.$id.'/maxresdefault.jpg 1280w
">
</a>
</div>

Now I’ve got a clickable responsive image that links through to the video on YouTube. Time to enhance. I’m going to add a smidgen of JavaScript to listen for a click on that link.

Over on The Session, I’m using addEventListener but here on adactio.com I’m going to be dirty and listen for the event directly in the markup using the onclick attribute.

When the link is clicked, I nuke the link and the image using innerHTML. This injects an iframe where the link used to be (by updating the innerHTML value of the link’s parentNode).

onclick="event.preventDefault();
this.parentNode.innerHTML='<iframe src=https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/'.$id.'?autoplay=1></iframe>'"

But notice that I’m not using the default YouTube URL for the iframe. That would be:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-eiqhVmSPcs

Instead I’m swapping out the domain youtube.com for youtube-nocookie.com:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-eiqhVmSPcs

I can’t remember where I first came across this undocumented parallel version of YouTube that has, yes, you guessed it, no cookies. It turns out that, not only is the default YouTube embed code bad for performance, it is—unsurprisingly—bad for privacy too. So the youtube-nocookie.com domain can protect your site’s visitors from intrusive tracking. Pass it on.

Anyway, I’ve got the markup I want now:

<div>
<a class="videoimglink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eiqhVmSPcs"
onclick="event.preventDefault();
this.parentNode.innerHTML='<iframe src=https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-eiqhVmSPcs?autoplay=1></iframe>'">
<img width="100%" loading="lazy"
src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/default.jpg"
alt="The Banks Of Lough Gowna (jig) on mandolin"
srcset="
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/mqdefault.jpg 320w,
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/hqdefault.jpg 480w,
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-eiqhVmSPcs/maxresdefault.jpg 1280w
">
</a>
</div>

The functionality is all there. But I want to style the embedded images to look more like playable videos. Time to break out some CSS (this is why I added the videoimglink class to the YouTube link).

.videoimglink {
    display: block;
    position: relative;
}

I’m going to use generated content to create a play button icon. Because I can’t use generated content on an img element, I’m applying these styles to the containing .videoimglink a element.

.videoimglink::before {
    content: '▶';
}

I was going to make an SVG but then I realised I could just be lazy and use the unicode character instead.

Right. Time to draw the rest of the fucking owl:

.videoimglink::before {
    content: '▶';
    display: inline-block;
    position: absolute;
    background-color: var(--background-color);
    color: var(--link-color);
    border-radius: 50%;
    width: 10vmax;
    height: 10vmax;
    top: calc(50% - 5vmax);
    left: calc(50% - 5vmax);
    font-size: 6vmax;
    text-align: center;
    text-indent: 1vmax;
    opacity: 0.5;
}

That’s a bunch of instructions for sizing and positioning. I’d explain it, but that would require me to understand it and frankly, I’m not entirely sure I do. But it works. I think.

With a translucent play icon positioned over the thumbnail, all that’s left is to add a :hover style to adjust the opacity:

.videoimglink:hover::before,
.videoimglink:focus::before {
    opacity: 0.75;
}

Wheresoever thou useth :hover, thou shalt also useth :focus.

Okay. It’s good enough. Ship it!

If you embed YouTube videos on your site, and you’d like to make them more performant, check out this custom element that Paul made: Lite YouTube Embed. And here’s a clever technique that uses the srcdoc attribute to get a similar result (but don’t forget to use the youtube-nocookie.com domain).

At Clearleft, we’ve worked with quite a few clients on site redesigns. It’s always a fascinating process, particularly in the discovery phase. There’s that excitement of figuring out what’s currently working, what’s not working, and what’s missing completely.

The bulk of this early research phase is spent diving into the current offering. But it’s also the perfect time to do some competitor analysis—especially if we want some answers to the “what’s missing?” question.

It’s not all about missing features though. Execution is equally important. Our clients want to know how their users’ experience shapes up compared to the competition. And when it comes to user experience, performance is a huge factor. As Andy says, performance is a UX problem.

There’s no shortage of great tools out there for measuring (and monitoring) performance metrics, but they’re mostly aimed at developers. Quite rightly. Developers are the ones who can solve most performance issues. But that does make the tools somewhat impenetrable if you don’t speak the language of “time to first byte” and “first contentful paint”.

When we’re trying to show our clients the performance of their site—or their competitors—we need to tell a story.

Web Page Test is a terrific tool for measuring performance. It can also be used as a story-telling tool.

You can go to webpagetest.org/easy if you don’t need to tweak settings much beyond the typical site visit (slow 3G on mobile). Pop in your client’s URL and, when the test is done, you get a valuable but impenetrable waterfall chart. It’s not exactly the kind of thing I’d want to present to a client.

Fortunately there’s an attention-grabbing output from each test: video. Download the video of your client’s site loading. Then repeat the test with the URL of a competitor. Download that video too. Repeat for as many competitor URLs as you think appropriate.

Now take those videos and play them side by side. Presentation software like Keynote is perfect for showing multiple videos like this.

This is so much more effective than showing a table of numbers! Clients get to really feel the performance difference between their site and their competitors.

Running all those tests can take time though. But there are some other tools out there that can give a quick dose of performance information.

SpeedCurve recently unveiled Page Speed Benchmarks. You can compare the performance of sites within a particualar sector like travel, retail, or finance. By default, you’ll get a filmstrip view of all the sites loading side by side. Click through on each one and you can get the video too. It might take a little while to gather all those videos, but it’s quicker than using Web Page Test directly. And it might be that the filmstrip view is impactful enough for telling your performance story.

If, during your discovery phase, you find that performance is being badly affected by third-party scripts, you’ll need some way to communicate that. Request Map Generator is fantastic for telling that story in a striking visual way. Pop the URL in there and then take a screenshot of the resulting visualisation.

The beginning of a redesign project is also the time to take stock of current performance metrics so that you can compare the numbers after your redesign launches. Crux.run is really great for tracking performance over time. You won’t get any videos but you will get some very appealing charts and graphs.

Web Page Test, Page Speed Benchmarks, and Request Map Generator are great for telling the story of what’s happening with performance right now—Crux.run balances that with the story of performance over time.

Measuring performance is important. Communicating the story of performance is equally important.