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posted by janrinok on Friday January 26 2018, @04:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-blaze-a-trail-that-others-might-follow dept.

Now that web pages weigh in at tens of megabytes and make scores of external calls, those with bandwidth caps are in for a raw deal unless the trend turns. A pseudo-anonymous blogger makes the appeal to please keep your blog light, as in kilobytes per page rather than megabytes.

The light went on for him when moving to a mobile service plan with a 25MB per month limit. It turns out that 25MB is barely enough to load seven blog posts from the site Medium. There the pages can be 3.26MB each and 25 divded by 3.26 is only about 7.6. Pages of that size would have taken close to 10 minutes to load over an old dialup connection. Most other sites are just as bad or worse. He walks through some easy steps to guarantee a lean web site with low bandwidth requirements and fast load times.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by KritonK on Friday January 26 2018, @09:25AM (3 children)

    by KritonK (465) on Friday January 26 2018, @09:25AM (#628160)

    25 MB per month is probably way too unrealistic, and using one of the free blog-hosting platforms, such as wordpress.com, guarantees that your blog will be loaded with javascript and custom fonts, over which you have little to no control. This, however, does not mean that you should exacerbate the problem by making your blog pages even heavier. Here are some rules that I apply in my own blog:

    • Do not use a background image. It doesn't add anything to your blog, and can prove to be a distraction. Pick a suitable background color, instead.
    • Do not put your entire post on the first page of the blog. The first page contains several posts and, if all these posts appear in their entirety, the first page can become very heavy. Use whatever facility your blogging platform provides, e.g., WordPress's <!--more> tag, to show only the beginning of your post.
    • Get a paint program (gimp is free and perfect for the job) and resize your images to the size that will be used in your post, before uploading them. Just because your camera takes 10 Mpixel photos, doesn't mean that you have to upload them at this size, when all you want to show is a 400×300 thumbnail. While you're at it, do not use the default conpression quality of 90 for JPEG images. 75 is perfectly fine, and produces smaller image files than the default.
    • Just because your blogging platform allows you to surround your blog pages with all kinds of fancy widgets, doesn't mean that you actually have to use them, so use them sparingly.
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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 26 2018, @03:20PM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday January 26 2018, @03:20PM (#628279)

    Get a paint program (gimp is free and perfect for the job) and resize your images to the size that will be used in your post

    Some users however would like to see a higher-resolution version of the photo. Good web design has at least two sizes: one small one for showing by default, and then a high-res version you can see by clicking on the the small one. Most users won't want to see the high-res versions of most photos, so you save tons of bandwidth while still allowing access for those interested.

    • (Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday January 26 2018, @08:41PM

      by KritonK (465) on Friday January 26 2018, @08:41PM (#628507)

      Then upload both a thumbnail and the full size image, put the thumbnail in your article, and link it to the full size image. Don't put the full size image in your post, relying on the width and height parameters of the image tag to do the scaling. Browsers will be able to scale the image to the correct size, but they have to load it first.

      I suppose that whether or not you want to provide full-size images depends on what your posts are about. If they are about the images, then you may need to provide them in full size. If they are about some other subject and the images only illustrate the text of the post, then thumbnails are usually adequate.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @11:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @11:22PM (#628616)

      As bog standard as this used to be, now people seem surprised when you suggest this...

      Many people are way too rich.