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: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @07:17PM (4 children)
Funny how a newspaper loads no faster today on a high speed connection than back in the last century at 33K. It annoys the hell out of me, too.
My two sites are very light; pure HTML (a tiny bit of javascript on 3 pages that wouldn't render well on a phone to sent the phone version, and an equally tiny bit of CSS). An entire book on my site loads faster than a single newspaper article.
I think the problem stems from the fact that few of us still code HTML by hand, it's all tools now, and tools have always written terrible, bloated, insecure garbage. If you don't know HTML (it ain't rocket science) you shouldn't even have a web site.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:43PM
Kind of like writing a program using Visual Studio.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:20AM
Scoop.kuro5hin.org got owned by a lot of link spammers. Just out of curiosity I clicked one link.
To my great surprise it was a professional-looking site that sold Wordpress themes. And not just any themes:
Whoever drew those images quite clearly studied at a top art school. They were so beautiful. I could really see how the artist poured their heart and soul into their creation.
How much is this link spamming helping such an undiscovered genius? let's ask google:
Just one hit for "site:beautifulthemes.com". How can that be? I had a look at their HTML.
The head element of the homepage had a "nofollow" meta tag. What that does is tell web robots not to crawl any page other than that homepage.
When I realized that must be the default for newly installed WordPress sites I was stricken with grief. How that artist suffered in hopes of bringing their beautiful art to the rest of the world - and only because they don't understand HTML. They didn't need to create HTML but to delete that nofollow tag they needed to understand HTML well enough to know what a nofollow tag is.
I expect most if not all the other Scoop link spammers had the very same problem.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday January 30 2018, @02:09PM (1 child)
Ah yes, Wirth's Law. [wikipedia.org]
Or, if you prefer:
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:55PM
Yes, that's annoyed me for decades. What makes it worse is I went to Wirth Jr. High before Wirth's law (early 1960s).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org