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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

#121

Post by pmlnr »

romaniv wrote: post #100
jtms wrote: post #81

I am going to guess they are getting a massive surge of traffic about now and yet the site still renders in a fraction of the time it takes most "modern" web apps or even just static content sites - this is how it should be.

Honestly, I'm not even sure what modern website are doing when they generate pages. I've had highly dynamic PHP/MySQL websites running on crap hardware, and it was trivial to attain .03 second page generation time. Didn't even need fancy caching, just some common-sense SQL optimizations.

It's crappy wordpress themes.

Before going static as well I made a WP theme with Twig, removing most from there. It was fast, way faster, than the usual WP themes. Obviously nowhere close to a static HTML.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#122

Post by newsDerp »

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…

Yeah, as a random viewer, I really only need to know that the power is running out when the last bit of charge is nearly used up, at like 5% maybe.

I have no concept of whether even 10% means another hour or another year, and since it's load dependent, neither do they. If the power is at 75%, what do I care?

It really belongs on a status page, and as a banner, pinned to the top of the page. If anything, it motivates random people to slam the page with more hits, just so they can watch the meter move.

That was my second impression, once I realized what it was. I wanted to watch for a chnage. My first impression was that the styles were defective, it was a scripting error (until I read that extra fluff was eschewed) or whatever, but I just wanted to find a way to make it get out of the way, so I could read without the distraction, so I started looking for "dismiss" icons, to close a broken pop-up.

Then I noticed the Sun icon and the percentage, and realized it was a meter.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#123

Post by pmlnr »

dmos62 wrote: post #85

The idea is great, the software side especially is something I'd like to see more of, and the not-always-available scheme is very commendable as well. But the end of article stuck out at me. > we'll be offering print on demand versions of our blog. How is that consistent with low energy footprint? Will the printers and the cellulose factory run on solar as well?

Print, on it's own, is not that high energy. Paper has been made for thousands of years, printing has been here for 400.

But the question is indeed an intriguing one.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#124

Post by jrwr »

hashmal wrote: post #77
tw1010 wrote: post #33

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…

See "brutalist" websites. At the start it was very similar in spirit with this website: raw, functional, rejecting looks for something you appreciate in a different way. Now: ugly, full of js, heavy.

Its what I did with beatsaver: https://beatsaver.com

1.4MB (most are thumbnails) and kept to stock bootstrap 3

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#125

Post by pmlnr »

avhon1 wrote: post #115
azdle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all.atom.xml ^ seems to have full articles.

Seems to have links to, and 1-sentence descriptions of, all of their articles. This isn't very useful if you want your RSS reader to pull down articles for you to read while you're offline. For that to work, you want the feed itself to have the full text of every article embedded inside it.

It has the full content. See view-source. Firefox hides it.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#126

Post by spitfire »

l_t wrote: post #106
tw1010 wrote: post #33

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…

I think the article hits on the key problem: "Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system." IMO, this can only become mainstream once there is no longer an expectation of "100%" uptime for websites in general. It's far-fetched, but I can imagine it becoming mainstream if mesh networking becomes popular, or if the Internet were to become a widely self-hosted platform…

Why can't you do some non-linear optimization with your resource routing? Power grids have been doing this for ages.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#127

Post by emodendroket »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #38
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).

It might be annoying if you're really trying to get a good look at something, but I think it is kind of a neat aesthetic. Some of the old PC-Engine/whatever dithered art looks great.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#129

Post by protonfish »

vanderZwan wrote: post #112
protonfish wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it did save bandwidth, that does not equal significant energy savings. And if it did, there are better ways to save. For example, looking at their response headers I see the image cache control expires after a day, plus has validation caching. This could be significantly improved. First, get rid of the `etag`, `expires`, and `last-modified` headers and go with expiration caching only. Increase the `max-age` f…

> First, get rid of the `etag`, `expires`, and `last-modified` headers and go with expiration caching only. Increase the `max-age` from one day (86400) to one year (31536000). Since it's a statically generated website, I'd favor never expiring the cache, and using cache-busting hashes instead. That way the cache is only emptied when the file actually changes.

Unfortunately there is no "never" setting. The HTTP spec recommends 1 year.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#130

Post by emodendroket »

zmw wrote: post #99
binaryorganic wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, as it reduces overall filesize. They could have achieved similar efficiency by compressing full-color images though.

Or they can do away with some of the useless images and save a lot more bytes.

> The main challenge was to reduce page size without making the website less attractive. Because images take up most of the bandwidth, it would be easy to obtain very small page sizes and lower energy use by eliminating images, reducing their number, or making them much smaller. However, visuals are an important part of Low-tech Magazine’s appeal, and the website would not be the same without them.
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