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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

#11

Post by floatingatoll »

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…

Yes, halfway into the article they explain that it’s precisely that, and what motivates them to make it visible to users.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#12

Post by b2ccb2 »

The dithering is nice for some images but it takes some details on graphs etc..

The example image given can be re-compressed using techniques like structural similarity (SSIM)[1] or Multi-scale structural similarity (2003 Paper)[2]. Using jpeg-archive[3] I resized the example image from the blog[4] with decent results:

  /tmp  ls -1sh *.jpg *.png | sort -nr
  740K 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png
  100K 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.jpg
   64K small-fry.jpg
   56K mpe.jpg
   24K ms-ssim.jpg
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_similarity

[2] https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~z70wang/publications/msssim.pdf

[3] https://github.com/danielgtaylor/jpeg-archive

[4] http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b...

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#13

Post by veli_joza »

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 feel that the focus on infrastructure _is_ the content. It may be over the top (dithering is especially BS), but without battery indicator how many people would discover that the server runs on sustainable solar power?

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#14

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

I think this is a really cool idea actually. I help run a fair few websites for authors/creators that don't need 5 digits of up-time and super heavy websites. I'm sure most blogs/sites would be fine being much much lighter and running off something like this.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#15

Post by ktpsns »

b2ccb2 wrote: post #12

The dithering is nice for some images but it takes some details on graphs etc.. The example image given can be re-compressed using techniques like structural similarity (SSIM)[1] or Multi-scale structural similarity (2003 Paper)[2]. Using jpeg-archive[3] I resized the example image from the blog[4] with decent results: /tmp ls -1sh *.jpg *.png | sort -nr 740K 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png 100K 6a00e009…

If I understand you correctly, you propose a image format which should provide a better quality for less file size. However, to implement an in-browser client-side reader, one probably needs a javascript library, and this will blow up the size again [Side note: Actually I am surprised the site uses JavaScript at all, being that static].

Another proposal for image compression is to fall back on SVG, c.f. https://jmperezperez.com/svg-placeholders/ -- at least this does not need JS.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#16

Post by juliangoldsmith »

decasia wrote: post #10

Neat article, but I think we should distinguish basically two things here that the article blurs together: 1) Reducing website bandwidth and computational usage (static sites, small images, reducing extra resource requests). Super common topic that HN talks about all the time. 2) Reducing the electricity bill for the server and powering it with renewable resources. This part is quite neat, I think, but for a single b…

Is that a comment on the effort to produce a site like this, or the cheapness of energy and bandwidth?

The effort required to produce a site like this would be negligible, given that it's almost entirely plain HTML. Dithering the images would take seconds in something like GIMP. The HTML looks to have been produced by a tool, based on the formatting, so they wouldn't need to spend time working with markup.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#20

Post by b2ccb2 »

ktpsns wrote: post #15
b2ccb2 wrote: post #12

The dithering is nice for some images but it takes some details on graphs etc.. The example image given can be re-compressed using techniques like structural similarity (SSIM)[1] or Multi-scale structural similarity (2003 Paper)[2]. Using jpeg-archive[3] I resized the example image from the blog[4] with decent results: /tmp ls -1sh *.jpg *.png | sort -nr 740K 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png 100K 6a00e009…

If I understand you correctly, you propose a image format which should provide a better quality for less file size. However, to implement an in-browser client-side reader, one probably needs a javascript library, and this will blow up the size again [Side note: Actually I am surprised the site uses JavaScript at all, being that static]. Another proposal for image compression is to fall back on SVG, c.f. https://jmper…

Those are compression techniques, they do not require js, nor a different client and work with the jpeg standard.
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