Thoughts on Smush.it

I developed a plugin last year that integrated Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan’s Smush.it service with WordPress.   In a nutshell, it reduced the file size of all images uploaded to WordPress without losing any quality.

Stoyan and Nicole are Yahoo! employees, and Smush.it was moved under the Yahoo! banner fairly soon after its launch.  I was pleased to see that move.  Long before Google-hosted jQuery and Closure, Yahoo! was making high-quality tools available to web developers (YUI library, YUI Compressor) for free.  They integrated Smush.it with YSlow and put up a basic web interface.

Since then, Yahoo! has moved Smush.it fairly often, and I’ve been playing cat-and-mouse with them, changing the API endpoint URL in my plugin to try to match their changes. This has been in response to a bunch of support requests from my users in the forums, and many more by email.

For a while I felt indignant. The service worked–in fact it was being used by YSlow every day–and if they would just stop moving things around then my unauthorized access to their API would work just fine. Stoyan had complimented me on the plugin, which I took as tacit approval.  The load from WP Smush.it users must have been minimal.

I’ve come around a bit since then.  I freely acknowledge that I don’t know what it takes to keep a service like Smush.it up and running. If they don’t want my plugin using Smush.it, that’s there prerogative.  My gripe now is about communication.

When I developed the plugin there was a public API, and over the course of a few months the endpoint URL kept changing without any word from Yahoo!  I kept trying to catch up, thinking that they were just in flux and that a stable service was just around the corner.

So, here’s the “ask” (as they say in business): I’d like to know if Yahoo! intends to make Smush.it available for API access sometime in the near future (I finally found out that it is temporarily unavailable).  One way or the other I need to figure out what to do with this plugin.  I’m happy either way.