Question regarding merging / minify of css and .js

Store Builder Questions
1

Ive been playing with smartoptimizer mentioned in the previous speed optimization threads and Ive noticed that it doesnt minify styles.base.css because its @imported by styles.css. This seems easy enough to fix by creating manual links for each style sheet (maybe) but I tried the easy way out by using the true google minify script. I was able to merge them but was getting a weird error which I think has more to do with my file structure than anything else.



Anyway, Im planning to start optimizing my css tonight and I wanted to know if:


  1. Is there a program out there that will not only compress my style sheets but also run a check to see what elements in the css are not ever used so that i can confidently remove them.



    Update: I found this site [url]http://services.immike.net/css-checker/[/url] it says it does what I was asking except that I couldnt get it to work for me. If anyone has any success please let me know.



    Update 2: Jackpot! - [url][brothercake] Dust-Me Selectors its a firefox addon that scans all the pages on your site and then gives you a report of what CSS selectors are unused. You can submit your sitemap.xml to it and it will comb through your site like crazy and give you an accurate report.


  2. Has anyone played around with removing the @import call in styles.css and just linking styles.base.css manually? Im curious if there is an easy way to do this through the my_changes addon as Ive never used the addon before.



    Update: No need for this now, I just manually compressed the styles.base.css file using this site [url]CSS Drive Gallery- CSS Compressor (Advanced Mode) and for ultimate compression use this site [url]http://iceyboard.no-ip.org/projects/css_compressor[/url]


  3. For you minify users out there, did you have any luck merging .js files? I tired last night and couldnt get ajax functionality working if I merged jquery with anything else.



    Update 3: Was able to merge jquery.js, core.js and ajax.js using this [url]Scriptalizer.com is for sale | HugeDomains


  4. Anyone who uses smartoptimizer, were you able to get it to combine css or .js files successfully and what imbed size settings are you using?
2

I am alos interested in if anyone has smartoptimizer combining css and/or js files

I am looking at setting up minify for this purpose, and also hope to find out how to use ‘My Changes’ to replace the calls to both js and css files.



Any help would be appreciated… right now smartoptimizer has really helped my set up, but yslow still shows a delay due to the number of attached files combing should rally help.