SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FakeBeldin on Friday January 26 2018, @10:41AM
Take whatever dynamic webpage generator you prefer, use that, and create a script that just wgets your dynamic version and dumps it on your site.
I used to have that hooked into subversion. I.e. using subversion for version control, but any committed changes were auto-uploaded to the server by means of a post-commit-hook.
Of course, there's plenty of alternatives. For a blog you might want to use wordpress.org, scrape that somehow and host it yourself.
That is, if you actually care about having it static.
Fixed that for you. It's no longer 1995, we're no longer playing text adventures over dialup. There's a difference between sane page size reduction and being ridiculous. If the point of your blog is to convey text to readers, then indeed it should not take megabytes. However, if you want to tell a story, and photos / graphics help the story, then use them.
And if you want to share photos online, then indeed watch your page size, but don't go crazy trying to fit multiple photos into 20kb. That's impossible - there's no good compromise. If you truly care about page size, optimise your thumbnails for size (in bytes), and keep the number of thumbnails per page "reasonable". Keep the dimensions you would use normally, and keep the quality settings you'd use. Folks are coming to that page to see photos, not pixels. It's okay if that is slower.
That's not what a blog is about. If you want to make money from your online presence, go ahead - and don't worry about bytes in that case. Many folks make money off of videos or streaming, and that's definitely not light on bytes.