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How to Build a Low-Tech Website

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#31

Post by adav »

ryanianian wrote: post #7

The dithering on images is actually kinda nice. Less visual over-stimulation. But whatever this site is doing with the fixed-scroll yellow block is super weird. There's a "95%" thing next to a sun - is it somehow related to the solar battery powering the server? Rather than focusing on the content, the design focuses on the infrastructure at the expense of the content. Maybe that's the point, but this particular elem…

It's obviously subjective, but I really like the yellow-ish block background for the battery level. Lends the site a distinctive paper-like feel that reminds me of the Financial Times.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#32

Post by kmgr »

ravenstine wrote: post #26

I once basically did just that, besides the image dithering. I ran a small blog off a Raspberry Pi, only using Markdown files and something to render them to HTML. I used my own IP address, which I know you're not technically supposed to do but in 15 years I've never had an ISP crack down on me for it, and had a script that would run periodically to update the A record for my domain in Route 53. (since my IP was dyna…

What is the reason for not using your own ip?

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#33

Post by tw1010 »

Small sub-cultures, like this one, do experiments all the time in their little corner of the web. Some of the cultures die after a while, and some grow into something else, something bigger, something that starts to percolate on the mainstream surface, albeit possibly only tangental to how it started. I'm not sure I'd predict this movement will grow into something that reaches mainstream tech, but let's say I'm wrong, just for fun. Can anyone here think of a potential narrative that would describe how the current state of this experiment could possibly be perturbed and squeezed into a form that the mainstream soaks up as the next big (or medium-sized) thing?

I'm just curious to know how my prediction that this won't grow any larger than it is today could be wrong.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#34

Post by H1Supreme »

kmgr wrote: post #32
ravenstine wrote: post #26

I once basically did just that, besides the image dithering. I ran a small blog off a Raspberry Pi, only using Markdown files and something to render them to HTML. I used my own IP address, which I know you're not technically supposed to do but in 15 years I've never had an ISP crack down on me for it, and had a script that would run periodically to update the A record for my domain in Route 53. (since my IP was dyna…

What is the reason for not using your own ip?

I believe it goes against most terms of service agreements with non-commercial isp plans.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#36

Post by adambowles »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #22

Dithered images do not compress well. I'd be interested to see side-by-side comparisons of optimised pngs, optimised jpeg, reduced-pallete optimised pngs, and some more cutting-edge formats like BPG[0] and FLIF[1] [0] https://bellard.org/bpg/ [1] https://flif.info/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076214

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#37

Post by amelius »

ryanianian wrote: post #7

The dithering on images is actually kinda nice. Less visual over-stimulation. But whatever this site is doing with the fixed-scroll yellow block is super weird. There's a "95%" thing next to a sun - is it somehow related to the solar battery powering the server? Rather than focusing on the content, the design focuses on the infrastructure at the expense of the content. Maybe that's the point, but this particular elem…

> The dithering on images is actually kinda nice. Less visual over-stimulation.

Yes, but does it also consume less power, formatting the images this way?

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#38

Post by theandrewbailey »

ryanianian wrote: post #7

The dithering on images is actually kinda nice. Less visual over-stimulation. But whatever this site is doing with the fixed-scroll yellow block is super weird. There's a "95%" thing next to a sun - is it somehow related to the solar battery powering the server? Rather than focusing on the content, the design focuses on the infrastructure at the expense of the content. Maybe that's the point, but this particular elem…

I agree with you on the yellow background battery meter, but not the dithered images. At desktop sizes, it reminds me of the low-res dithered hell of the 90s, except its worse because it's effectively yellowscale. I hate image dithering with a burning passion. I bet the same images would look better as low res JPEGs (they are currently PNGs, which are made less compressible with the dithering noise).
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