Back yonder when I was a WordPress developer, I would diligently concat and minimize my CSS and fine tune my .htaccess files to perfection.

Around that time Yahoo was releasing neat tools for web developers. One of them was Smush.it - a web service that took images and reduced their file sizes by reducing colour palettes, re-compressing, and stripping EXIF data.

And so I wrote a WordPress plugin - WP Smush.it - that optimized all of a site’s uploaded images.

The Smush.it web service was not particularly reliable and caused a lot of frustration to non-technical users. So around 2013 I was glad to sell the plugin to WPMU-DEV.

Since then they’ve maintained it beautifully. As of 2023 it’s exceeded 50MM downloads.