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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

#21

Post by JepZ »

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…

  
    
      95%
Looks pretty much like the battery level and current weather conditions ;-)

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#23

Post by ravenstine »

trqx wrote: post #19

I hope they fix the RSS feed and put the whole articles in there. It should be the norm, especially on a website with "low" uptime.

It would be nice if there was a site that indexed RSS feeds that contain whole articles, not just ledes and snippets meant to get you to click into ad-riddled articles.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#24

Post by markatkinson »

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…

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 into web development today like Webpack, NPM, React, Angular etc etc that I had forgotten how to actually just serve a piece of HTML.

My dependence on all these frameworks and CLIs sent me on a quest to find out more about pure javascript, and I came across an incredible talk by a developer who created a pure javascript web app for music notation. I really wanted to link it here but cannot find it.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#26

Post by ravenstine »

I once basically did just that, besides the image dithering. I ran a small blog off a Raspberry Pi, only using Markdown files and something to render them to HTML. I used my own IP address, which I know you're not technically supposed to do but in 15 years I've never had an ISP crack down on me for it, and had a script that would run periodically to update the A record for my domain in Route 53. (since my IP was dynamic)

Whether you're doing it for energy purposes or not, it's a fun project because it feels a bit like sticking it to the man, since we're used to always hosting our sites on someone else's machine.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#27

Post by EForEndeavour »

JepZ wrote: post #21
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…

95% Looks pretty much like the battery level and current weather conditions ;-)

Before starting to read the article, I tried clicking and dragging on that element and searched the page for "brightness" and "dim" before peeking at the source to realize it isn't a brightness control after all.

Re: How to Build a Low-Tech Website

#28

Post by g105b »

jkingsbery wrote: post #18

I'm curious how the energy usage for this site compares to something like hosting a site on S3.

Using a datacentre such as S3 will gain the benefits of an economy of scale. Per-website S3 energy costs are going to be substantially lower than the energy cost of a solar-server: each solar-server that is installed will have had to have been built in factories which cost energy to run, shipped in delivery vehicles which cost energy to drive, plus the humans behind the website would require energy while building the server... all of which would easily be more than the net energy consumption of a single website in S3.

That being said, the point of the project is to produce a website that is 100% solar powered. They never said they were aiming for something that is feasibly sustainable.

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