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During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
11–20 of 193 posts
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#12CMSs should normalize having a text only version of your website.
I think with a little effort they could make it pretty frictionless for their users who it turn would be happy to provide it.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#13As a mild lifelong disaster "junky" (grew up in remote areas, dealt with cyclones, floods, droughts, fires, monsoons, coup d'etats, unannounced atomic tests etc during decades of global field work) this description:
As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm, and the following week.
I remember trying in vain to find out info about the storm damage and road closures—watching loaders spin and spin on blank pages until they timed out trying to load.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#14"The last couple times I used my dental insurance website, it was completely not mobile responsive, requiring the old-school pinch zoom to even get to anything on the page."
And yet you probably didn't change your dental insurance based on this, because most likely there are more important issues that matter (e.g. you are given a single option by your employer). This is exactly the reason why that company is not likely to fix it, because the lousy website's effect on their bottom line is nearly zero. (Note that I don't like this either)
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#15[flagged]
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#16Other Helene stuff I took note of:
- AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up
- I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit
- It worked pretty well!
- The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down
Non-internet learnings:
- Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#17Several news sites offer text only versions. https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://wttr.in/ More listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.
Thanks for sharing, i almost was not sure if the last part was sarcasm. Html itself was the standard, then when it got bloated we got rss. This seems like it’s not a problem of a lack of standards. It’s the company choosing not to promote it.
I suppose I meant more of a best practice - if every news site could be found at the subdomain of lite.XYZ.com, or perhaps some way for the browser to request specifically no images or styles, it’d be easier for the end user to find.
RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#18[flagged]
It's not really written there, but how about a loading experience that gives you the important information, and then loads the bells and whistles as the JavaScript gets loaded and run. First make sure the plain text information gets loaded, maybe a simple JPEG when something graphical like a map is needed, and then load the Megabytes of React or Angular to make it all pretty and the map be interactive...
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#19One thing that I would also suggest folks who are resonating with this piece consider...
Local copies of important information on your mobile device. Generally your laptops are not going to see much use. Mobile apps tend to fake local data and store lots of things to the cloud. We tend to ignore such things like backups and local copies nowadays. Most of the time we can get away without any worry here but consider keeping a copy of things like medications and their non commercial names for situations like this as well.
Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
#20[flagged]
I'm not sure I understand. Are you implying we should not design our technology around serious edge cases that humans encounter in life? Why wouldn't we target people in crisis when we design crisis management information sites?