71–80 of 188 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're proud that you make webpages that can't be consumed by the primary method most people use to get online?
Even more confusing, the linked website seems to work just fine on my Moto.
I don't have a cellphone myself, so i never tested it.
I'm proud of my low tech personal website: http://mrtno.com - I promise: it will never work on smartphones, just good old computers... I will build your static html page for money. Hit me up. ;)
The CSS @media attribute has been widely available since IE6. It's not exactly high tech.
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…
Could well not happen, but the most likely driver of slimmed down websites, anyway, would be a desire to make them load better in India, Africa, parts of Latin America and eastern Asia that have low connection speeds. Not saying that's how it will go, but it's feasible that to get to the second and third billion internet users, you need to be slimmer.
On the other hand, one of the first things people with disposable income want today is good internet access, so as income grows for the middle five billion (and it's growing rapidly), there's tremendous market pressure to supply them with faster internet - maybe not up to the standards of the top billion, but not "low tech" either.
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 ;-)
edit: nvm, just found the javascript that rejiggers the DOM based on data from https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/api/stats.json
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…
It's obviously subjective, but I really like the yellow-ish block background for the battery level. Lends the site a distinctive paper-like feel that reminds me of the Financial Times.
The site was 95% solar, but the blue bar at the top was 100% distracting. I could barely read the content.
From clicking around this site, it looks like their image dithering technique has taken away the color quality required to properly view the graphs on this article: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/the-4g-mobile-inte...
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
I do agree that the consistency is nice for aesthetic reasons, but poorly rendered images do detract from the overall message.
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…
It's a good start, but the CSS is obnoxious and definitely not low-tech, and the image dithering is a bad compromise between having real images and simply not having images at all. In short, it's an attempt at a low-tech website made by people who've never seen a real low-tech website, and probably wouldn't know Lynx if they saw it in use.
Some cool concepts there. >Static Site This should be an obvious choice for sites not requiring dynamic elements. Also their choice of comments through email is a good solution to a problem static-made blogs have. >Dithered Images That won't work for every case, but is interesting. >Default typeface That's nice. I'm already disallowing sites to choose their own typeface. Except if a site is about design, then the typ…
> This makes sense and I don't understand why self-hosted sites are doing it. The logs are there. Analyzing them is all that is needed. 1) Laziness. A third-party JS tracker usually comes with a complete dashboard, full of pretty (and sometimes even useful) graphs. 2) Data. Client-side trackers can spy on users more, giving you more information you can e.g. missapply in an A/B test trying to drive "engagement". RE 1,…
Lazy-loaded 1px images can be used for tracking how far users have read and a/b testing can be done by compiling multiple versions and redirecting users to the version you want them to try.
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…
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.