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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

#151

Post by aldoushuxley001 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #119
markatkinson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On topic 1 I was thinking to myself the other day, "I wonder if I can create a static webpage that isn't some sort of SPA or web app." It took me time to work out where to start... Once you think it through you realise it is pretty easy and obvious. But (and this gives away my age a bit), I have not built a static webpage since school (over 10 years ago), and have become so accustomed to all the crazy shit that goes…

> It took me time to work out where to start... Neocities? It's where I occasionally dump my static-can't-be-bothered sketches. http://neocities.org/

I was expecting an ancient 90s era neocities site, but it's actually very beautifullly designed. Well done Neocities.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#152

Post by blotter_paper »

seddin wrote: post #102
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.

A trillion npm packages will for sure add a couple seconds of delay to your website loading speed.

That depends on whether or not they are required for first render. Whatever scripts you attach will only be requested after the HTML is delivered, unless they're embedded (most aren't). Isomorphic rendering and rehydration can deliver and render just as fast as a static page, because it is a static page... at first. The problem with modern web page load times isn't the number npm packages bundled for the project, it's that developers/companies, through incompetence, laziness, or a desire to make sure that would-be NoScript users have to run their tracking code before being allowed to view content, don't always render basic content and functionality before requesting that bundle. The only exceptions to this I can think of are scripts that require you to run them before first render, like PayPal buttons that want to inspect everything, make sure they aren't in an iframe, etc.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#153

Post by profalseidol »

Mtinie wrote: post #140

I love the aesthetic! Great work. Here's my unsolicited design riff on the "battery indicator." I'm a fan of the concept, but the 100vw element width of the yellow fill was distracting me from the rest of the content. I used DevTools to mock up a narrow version which fits within the right content gutter, right next to the scroll bar. I had to tweak the percentage metric display a bit by stacking the sun above the val…

Lower tech access to the image:

https://i.imgur.com/o0Dtkai.png

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#154

Post by fivefive55 »

Mtinie wrote: post #140

I love the aesthetic! Great work. Here's my unsolicited design riff on the "battery indicator." I'm a fan of the concept, but the 100vw element width of the yellow fill was distracting me from the rest of the content. I used DevTools to mock up a narrow version which fits within the right content gutter, right next to the scroll bar. I had to tweak the percentage metric display a bit by stacking the sun above the val…

This looks great! That was my one complaint about the site, the meter looked like a broken element. I figured out what it was pretty quickly and I love the concept, but it just didn't look quite right.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#155

Post by fivefive55 »

jrwr wrote: post #124
hashmal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You made Beatsaver? Love your site, makes finding songs so much easier!

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#156

Post by fencepost »

As a way to make use of resources you'd otherwise not have a use for this is interesting, but my feeling is that as a way to reduce "your" energy consumption it's misguided. I'm pretty sure that the energy usage of running even on very efficient dedicated hardware is going to be a lot higher than the incremental increase in consumption for an incredibly tiny VM instance in a data center focused on energy efficiency.

The hardware choice is arguably overkill as well, at least if wifi is available and on use. Run it on a repurposed old phone, eliminate its share of the power draw of a network switch, etc.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#157

Post by gwern »

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…

What kind of compression do you get if you make a (colorized) copy of the dithered version and then use lossy compression on it?

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#158

Post by itronitron »

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…

well, if the sub-culture takes off among young people then it could supplant selfies as the means by which people broadcast what they are doing 'right now' ... interestingly that would drive down interest in going viral as a sudden spike in visitors could kill someone's site until the next day

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#159

Post by user111233 »

aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #151
vanderZwan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It took me time to work out where to start... Neocities? It's where I occasionally dump my static-can't-be-bothered sketches. http://neocities.org/

I was expecting an ancient 90s era neocities site, but it's actually very beautifullly designed. Well done Neocities.

There is a lot of user submitted 90s style content though.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#160

Post by user111233 »

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.

> just some common-sense SQL optimizations.

Thats probably it. Some beginner has written an n+1 query and the page is slow as shit now.

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