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During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

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Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#161

Post by swiftcoder »

miningape wrote: post #144
phantasmish wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.

But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it. This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.

Eh, it took me all of 2 days to strip all the unnecessary cookies out of our product, and convince management to leave out the giant unnecessary cookie banner.

The sites plastering those everywhere are doing a malicious compliance, pure and simple

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#163

Post by jcoby »

tehwebguy wrote: post #16

Other 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…

> - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up

It really depended on where you were. In my area everything was down. Literally and figuratively. The only utility that worked was gas.

T-Mobile was the first to come back up but it took weeks. I could occasionally get one bar of LTE if I climbed to the top of the hill but even then I could only send or receive about 1 SMS every few minutes.

Once I was able to get out of the neighborhood I could drive 5 miles away and get cell service and spotty data on Verizon.

NPR's updates were our most reliable way to get information on what was happening.

> - 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

Having supplies on hand and being patient worked out for us. We waited until 40 was clear and were able to head to the Triad for supplies and gas. In the mean time the neighborhood got together and cut up downed trees and filled in the missing road so it was easier to get in and out of the neighborhood.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#165

Post by xfil »

tehwebguy wrote: post #16

Other 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…

Not Helene for me, but another ISP frustration anecdote from living in a forested area (line damage from tree limbs is common enough) with imperfect cellular data connection:

- the Comcast Xfinity app is extremely bloated and runs into error after error on a poor connection, yet the only time I ever use it is when I have connection problems. Most other apps I use run smoother under similar circumstances. Boggles the mind why one of the US's largest ISPs wouldn't make their primary customer support portal be lightweight and reliable on spotty cellular data.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#166

Post by claudiulodro »

Interesting.

For Hurricane Helene specifically, my team at Newspack actually worked with Blue Ridge Public Radio and a number of other news organizations in the affected area to set up text versions of their websites for low bandwidth readers[1] and get info to 10s of thousands of people[2].

In fact, it was so successful (maybe not at reaching you specifically though), that we got a grant to roll out a general purpose plain text web solution for breaking news situations to news organizations across the country![3] So I think there may have been a mismatch in that you didn't know about all of the plain text versions of news sites available in your area during the disaster -- that's something we'll have to keep in mind.

[1] https://text.bpr.org/

[2] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/hell-or-high-water-bp...

[3] https://opennews.org/blog/press-forward-release/

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#168

Post by dredmorbius »

nickdothutton wrote: post #105

I now use a text only CLI utility to read the BBC news. It is (for me) a greatly improved experience.[1] 1. https://github.com/hako/bbcli

Interesting, and arguably useful, but I really have to push back on the whole notion of site-specific readers.

I have a text-only CLI utility to read BBC news: the w3m terminal-mode Web browser. (Substitute Lynx, links, elinks2, or any other TMWB of your preference.)

The experience is, unfortunately, kind of shit, because BBC (as with far too many other websites) fails to display well in a terminal-mode browser, but it at least works. And I can use the same browser on any other website.

The problem with site-specific tools, which includes of course mobile apps, is that now instead of invoking a general-purpose reader on any site, you have to choose both the site and the reader, and are dependent on that reader application / utility being continuously updated as the site itself changes.

(And, yes, I've written my own site-specific renderers, including one which produces a "newspaper"-formatted page based on the CNN "lite" website, which I've discussed on HN and elsewhere:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723661>

Longer description and screenshots:

https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>

The page takes about 10 minutes to generate (a bunch of serial article requests), but makes for good offline reading.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#169

Post by rickcarlino »

Check out Newswaffle on Gemini:// protocol.

The web could in theory support text-first content, but it won't. The Gemini protocol, though not perfect, was built to avoid extensibility that inevitably leads us away from text. I long for the day more bloggers make their content available on Gemspace, the way we see RSS as an option on some blogs.

The web will continue to stray from text-first content because it is too easy to add things that are not text.

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