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from the hope-we-don't-drain-the-battery dept.
Low-tech Magazine explains how to build a low-tech web site, using its own (solar powered) web site as an example. They cover both the web design and the actual hardware in use, an Olimex A20. The idea is to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing the content, seeing as complex designs with Javascript have burdensome resource requirements that translate into increased use of electricity. Renewable power sources alone are not enough to address the growing energy use of the Internet. Their server is also self-hosted so there's no need for third-party tracking and cookies either.
Low-tech Magazine was born in 2007 and has seen minimal changes ever since. Because a website redesign was long overdue — and because we try to practice what we preach — we decided to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered version of Low-tech Magazine. The new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.
Earlier on SN:
Conservative Web Development (2018)
About a Third of All Web Sites Run on WordPress (2018)
Please, Keep your Blog Light (2018)
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @01:34PM (6 children)
A solar powered SoC still needs an internet connection to be a web server.
This shitty hobbyist project is the equivalent of mounting a bicycle onto a coal burning train and trying to claim there is no engine.
Stick your heads up your own asses, enviro-ostriches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @02:05PM
For pointing out the oversight in our green design. Instead of self-hosting, Low-Tech guru geniuses are now piggyback-hosting on the neighbor's Wi-Fi. Now we have an energy efficient web site without an internet connection!
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:18PM
The featured article concedes that this project is a work in progress:
(Score: 4, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:43PM
An interesting point, but I would go a step further and look at the energy and resources consumed by MAKING devices they use, as well as the longevity of the devices themselves. (Will they have to throw all this stuff in the garbage after a year?) How much of that is REALLY recyclable, and how much power/resources are consumed recycling.
Also how efficient is their utilization really? Do we need one of these gadgets for each site? If everyone stuck to HTML3 and small static images you could probably host a million web sites off of a single "modern" high powered server.
Just in my opinion all the waste going in to VIEWING web sites should be addressed too. People buying and replacing cell phones or tablets every year just to view a few web sites, non-replaceable batteries, no long term software support, shitty hardware that falls apart after a year, ever changing "standards", desktops that have to be left on all night just to run Windows 10 updates, and so on, and so on.
(Score: 4, Touché) by requerdanos on Thursday September 27 2018, @06:43PM (2 children)
Indeed, they have gone to all this trouble to design and implement something in a more sustainable and energy efficient way, to see what can be learned from the process. Lots of troublesome details, pesky contributions to society, putting forth of effort, etc. What hypocrites.
You, by contrast, have expended no more energy than is necessary to be a noncontributing zero who simply complains about things on the Internet. Your energy savings in that endeavor will always far outweigh that of any producing, useful citizen, any day of the week.
Good job.
As it happens, I also host some websites on energy efficient Olimex A20s which replaced older systems that drew much more power than was necessary (a Pentium II and a Pentium 4 server were replaced in this project). Sure enough, I looked, and the things are connected to Internet. So I am one of those hypocrites you condemn, and I concede your chastisement with all the value it deserves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:33PM
I'm pretty sure the arsehole A/C above is one of those "conservatives" who are more than happy to burn the world down, as long as he's making "Libtards" unhappy.
It's always A/C too. Nobody actually wants to be identified with that sort of pointless posturing.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 28 2018, @03:00AM
I'm all in favor of trying things to learn. And goodness knows these guys need to learn a LOT, looks like from the comments on their own page they are already being educated by their users a bit. So it is good. But instead of emailing them a comment (which ya hafta do there) I'll just post a few of their current mistakes here.
1. Worrying about the wrong things. They worry about the filesize and transfer of a frickin logo and a custom font. Unless done totally wrong that happens exactly ONCE and gets cached by the browser. Not a problem.
2. Users there already schooled em about the dumb way they were trying to minimize graphics. Good on them for trying something and once they adopt the suggestions, anything that cuts bloat is good.
3. Going entirely ad free is probably going to cost em. You can have an ad on a page without going into total retard bloat. You really don't need a dozen trackers and beacons, half a dozen annoying ads and blocks of sponsored content, popup video, social media trackers / buttons and an Amazon affiliate link. Most users understand ads are not always horrible, one or two tasteful ones are just fine. I have written before about how ads should be, no need for a rerun.
4. Their power situation is sub-optimal. Ixnay on the basic bitch 12V 7A lead battery. Get an about to be discarded golf cart / marine / deep cycle battery, nothing greener than giving a second life to something about to be discarded. Even with 1/3 of rated capacity it will have much more storage and they could safely discharge it deeper than the 30% they have their controller set for. With their 50W panel if they get an hour of good light or can just generate at 10% (i.e. 5W) most of the day they are gaining net charge so that part is good. With a bigger battery they should be able to stop worrying about going down from low batt.