If you want to be online only part of the time, look into IPFS. Even if you go offline, your popular pages will likely be cached for a while, and can be cached forever if someone takes an interest in them.
How to Build a Low-Tech Website
181–188 of 188 posts
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website
#182Small 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…
I think it will more likely come when the true cost of high energy consumption is factored into our decisions, and people are forced to trade off high availability for low power consumption.
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced it saves much in the way of bandwidth, either. If you take this[0] image, it's 43 KB for a 800x533 image. I'd expect a JPEG to be able to do that without too much in the way of artifacts. It does give the page a kind of neat newspapery vibe, though. [0]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/sps_wide.png
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…
Hi I'm one of the people that worked on the webdesign, back-end and hardware. You are right about the caching, one of our strategies is actually to cache very aggressively. Not only for images but even for all HTML aside from the front page and about pages. This works for us since low-tech magazine only publishes a maximum of one article a month and the site spans a decade of content which won't change anymore.
However, since we were still working on the site at the time it got massively popular, we changed the caching settings in order for people to see the changes and fixes that we were pushing.
I'll look into those server headers as well!
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a similar vein, the weather icons are 800x800px images displayed at no larger than 20x20px
Those large icons are rather compression friendly compared to the dithered images. It would still be a relatively huge save at 20x20 (after resize to 20x20 with imagemagick and pngcrush -brute, the 5.5k clear-day.png goes down to 559 bytes).
800x800 indeed is excessive. We'll resize them to something smaller. Jquery is already on its way out. Thanks for the feedback!
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this seem a bit uncharitable a characterization? What's an example of a "real low-tech website" that does better than the work presented here? Are you browsing hackernews using lynx or surfraw?
https://yarchive.net/ That's a low-tech website. Absolutely nothing but content.
this is typical motherfuckingwebsite.com vs bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com.
The design team of solar.lowtechmagazine.com is squarely on the side of the bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced it saves much in the way of bandwidth, either. If you take this[0] image, it's 43 KB for a 800x533 image. I'd expect a JPEG to be able to do that without too much in the way of artifacts. It does give the page a kind of neat newspapery vibe, though. [0]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/sps_wide.png
If you look at the non-solarpowered website, it turns out that TypeKit is serving a 830,8 KiB fullcolour PNG file . AAARGH. No wonder that they think they need to use dithering and such if that is their baseline. I tried testing some variants and made a static HTML gallery on neocieties[1]. TL;DR: - cleaning up the photo before filtering it makes a huge difference in image quality and compression. - quality 80 JPG is…
Hi, I responded to your great comment over at lowtechmagazine[0]. I'm not sure if you check the thread there regularly so I'm also pinging you here
[0]: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtec...
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website
#187Earlier 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…
Yea here is the talk ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7n2xnOiWI8 ) I have found that static generators, specifically Hugo, have made just plain HTML fun again. They give you just enough power to not repeat yourself endlessly (e.g. maintaining each page and copy-pasta all changes between them) without turning into the system's we're all trying to step back from.
Yes, thank you! What a great talk.
Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website
#188Earlier 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…
Hi I'm one of the people that worked on the webdesign, back-end and hardware. You are right about the caching, one of our strategies is actually to cache very aggressively. Not only for images but even for all HTML aside from the front page and about pages. This works for us since low-tech magazine only publishes a maximum of one article a month and the site spans a decade of content which won't change anymore. Howev…
Cool, that makes sense. You should be able to easily turn off etags in your nginx config. This won't just save bytes in your response headers, but will stop a lot of HEAD requests to your server that are required to do validation caching.