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Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

mohkohn.co.uk

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Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#521

Post by faangguyindia »

AWTom wrote: post #496
faangguyindia wrote: post #50

Most of my apps are now simply HTMX + Go + SQLite. I've found it's enough for most projects. One of my sites is image heavy and serves 10 TB of traffic per month. For this, I use the following setup: 1. S3 (I wanted reliable data storage) 2. In front of it, I have Cloudflare (with Tiered Cache enabled, which makes POPs prefer pulling from Cloudflare rather than the origin). I've set rules to cache everything on both…

> Cloudflare will not let you run an image heavy site on its own Cloudflare R2 object storage is S3-compatible, offers free egress, and does not share their CDN product's fair use policy against image-heavy use. Storage is 65% the per-GB cost of S3.

yes, you are right i didn't see their update: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#522

Post by efreak »

nonethewiser wrote: post #183
Ruarl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Rick Rubin could take a tape to his car to listen to his mixes, your product people can try their websites on £20 phones from Tesco. They can ask to sit in on user tests with minority groups. Extending your knowledge like this is trivial, but rarely done.

Yeah but for those not using £20 phones from Tesco, where is the disrespect?

Not testing your software in the way your users use it is the disrespect. Not everyone has a modern device. Not everyone has 12gb RAM. Not everyone has 100mbps or even 10mbps. Not everyone has "unlimited" Internet.

If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load on the free Metro Wi-Fi, I'll go back to my search and pick a different page. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load on gigabit on a PC, I'll remember it and never click on links to it again.

If you don't respect my devices, then your work doesn't deserve my respect.

(Don't get me started on people calling themselves software _engineers_)

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#523

Post by whstl »

swiftcoder wrote: post #509
yawaramin wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good are you at hammering nails with a screwdriver? Tools are important. We have a more apropos saying in our industry: use the right tool for the job. Don't let your brain get fried by the 'poor workman' adage, it's talking about the difference between an expensive tool and a cheap tool of the same kind, not two tools of different kinds entirely.

> it's talking about the difference between an expensive tool and a cheap tool of the same kind, not two tools of different kinds entirely. I have trouble seeing how React vs Astro is two tools of different kind entirely?

Astro itself uses React.

It can use other libraries with it too, or just plain HTML, but it’s not in the same space.

React can’t work on the backend by itself without Astro, Next.js, etc, or some hand-made micro-framework.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#524

Post by efreak »

danudey wrote: post #118
naravara wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the Flash animation splash pages I was forced to sit through before being able to look up hours of operation.

As a teenager I remember going to a website for... a city, I think? And their 'sidebar' was a Java applet that did nothing but provide links for you to click with on-hover effects. The page used frames; the applet was in the left-side frame and the content was in the main frame on the right. The applet took 30 seconds to load. Once it loaded, it showed five buttons to click to get to different sections of the site. W…

You forgot to mention that the Java applet doesn't have antialiasing, so the entire menu looks like crap.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#525

Post by dlcarrier »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #286

> My client was a utility company > Adding a lot of pressure, this was a regulated monopoly > Some requirements I derived: > ... > We had to meet WCAG accessibility (the team settled on AA rather than AAA) The author doesn't doxx their employer by giving any dates, but if we take the story at face value and assume it took place in last few years, it is pretty shocking. How does it take a single hero to be fighting fo…

It didn't say anyone was fighting for it just that they had to. Whoever fought for the least possible compliance is the real hero. The less of that feel-good nonsense that is implemented, the easier it is for a text-only browser to parse, and the better a graphical browser works with the keyboard navigation that has been built into pretty much all web browsers since their conception.

Ideally, they ignore WCAG altogether, then throw on an overlay if compliance is required, which can be easily blocked by a dedicated blocker (e.g. https://www.accessibyebye.org/) or I just add a list of overlay domains to my ad blocker.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#526

Post by dlcarrier »

ThomW wrote: post #474

I teared up at the PSP talk. I feel terrible that life requires a level of technology that not everyone is capable of affording and it doesn’t seem right.

I had a PSP long before a cell phone, and the built-in browser was like a peek into the future. It really was janky, and could only scroll a page at a time, like an e-reader, but back then web pages didn't need a top-of-the-line computer with gigabytes of ram, to display text and the occasional image, so it was extremely useful when a laptop wasn't available. The button mapping was pretty good, and navigated similar text-based browsers like Lynx, but with the benefit of seeing images.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#527

Post by dlcarrier »

kristianp wrote: post #469
aidanbeck wrote: post #94

I was going to comment on the Terence Eden excerpt quoted by the author about the woman researching housing benefits on an old PSP browser, when I noticed that you (the OP) are Terence himself. It's strikingly powerful, and a reminder of the duty we have in building our infrastructure. > Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It is fri…

The PSP has 32MB of RAM plus 4MB of embedded RAM, upgraded to 64MB of RAM in later models, the browser also is limited to only a subset of that. I wonder how old the anecdote is? It's hard to imagine any websites now working on that. It does have javascript, but a version shipped with Netfront browser from 2011 or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable#Web_brows... Nice to see that Astro supports non-…

I used PSP browser a lot in the mate 2000's, and don't remember having much trouble. It could even display pages that, at the time, ware pretty bloated, like the Flash-based Homestar Runner cartoons.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#528

Post by dlcarrier »

genewitch wrote: post #163
nunez wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chase works with ad blockers, though. It doesn't work if you disable JavaScript...but it wasn't always this way! They had a mobile version of their online banking service at https://m.chase.com that was EXTREMELY FAST and did 85% of what you need to do in an online banking portal (check balances, transfer funds). They scrapped it when they moved to their current bloated monstrosity of the portal that they have today.…

i am unclear on if it's because of the adblocker (specifically i use ad nauseam which does block some JS. some.) or because of firefox. I can load it on edge every time it fails on firefox. last week, chase.com worked fine on firefox. the previous 15 months where i needed to log in, it did not. Someone at chase isn't checking their work on firefox.

CDNs like Cloudflare will often block traffic if you don't leak enough data to differentiate yourself from a bot. It's usually not very transparent either, with vague error messages. They've given up on just throwing up a captcha then letting you proceed, because bots are much better than real people, at solving them.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#529

Post by dlcarrier »

0xpgm wrote: post #80

Don't tell me were going to rediscover progressive enhancement all over again after more than a decade. Back when we used to actually care about the end user whether you were programming frontend or backend. Too much VC money and big tech influence in the JS ecosystem made the web worse in some ways.

I keep hearing the term "dead internet theory" getting thrown around, and at first thought it was referring to web pages that don't work, not high rates of bot-generated content.

I've had far more trouble with web pages that only work on a computer that's at least 80% similar to the developers computer, and the RAM sacrifice has been accepted, than from bots diluting real user-generated content, assuming I can even get to the page, if the CDN doesn't think I'm a bot myself, because I'm not logged into a Google or Apple account and their captcha is so bad only a bot could get through it.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#530

Post by dlcarrier »

TZubiri wrote: post #236

>She’s connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She’s not slicing fruit; she’s arming herself with knowledge. >The PSP’s web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time. Alluring, an annoying property of private software development is that making websites and software in general inaccessible to lower…

The best way to filter out unwanted users is to make them install software that just displays a webview of what could have been a completely open web page. That way, you only get the ones you can track, which is more important than their wealth, as poor customers often end up spending more on commodity items than someone who is wealthy.

In my experience, Apple and Google are the worst offenders at software bloat, maybe because they can afford to create releases every few weeks, so the bloat accumulates faster.

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