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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: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday September 27 2018, @01:47PM (29 children)
If they are going to complain about web pages needing so much more bandwidth and resources, they need to point the finger at the single biggest cause:
Advertising
As in all other media before the intarweb tubes, advertising ultimately destroys every single medium it touches.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:13PM (28 children)
You have a good point, but someone's got to pay for all of this. I like my free TV, paid for by simple advertising (when it doesn't intrude on the content), so I don't mind simple ads on webpages. Simple: no motion of any kind, no pop-ups ever, no interactive javascript spying / serving targeted ads, low bandwidth, low CPU / RAM usage, low screen real estate.
But that's largely on the client (browser) side hogging my power, CPU and RAM. In the servers I admin I find simple webpages, served by Apache on CentOS 6.x, use very little CPU / RAM, esp. with caching turned on. However, the WordPress sites' php code consume huge CPU, even with all of the optimization / caching I can find to do. So I think some code optimization is in order. It would be my vote to run compiled code only, not interpreted. Again, yes, I have binary caching turned on supposedly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:35PM (21 children)
Why? The www started good without all of that. The site owner paid for it because he had a story to tell (or information to share).
Now the reason seems to that the site owner does not care what's on there as long as the site brings revenue.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:04PM (19 children)
Indeed, I remember the internet before advertising became mainstream. The only sites that were up were people/organisations who really had something to say, or information to share, or a desire to communicate (where the internet was the cheapest method for them).
The concept of making money by just having a website exist with some information on it was alien. If you wanted money you had to do something, sell a service, or online mail-order, etc...
Indeed a lot of enthusiasts (myself included) ran websites just for the fun of it, or to learn how to do it, while being able to host our own little websites with hobby projects, most of the time on our own connections with dynamic DNS or static IP (if you had it). I sure never earned a cent on any of my websites in the last 15 years, but I still did it. Just getting emails from people thanking me for my problem solving pages was enough.
In addition, because it actually was a cost to run your "online presence", you had an incentive to make it as light, lean and fast as you could, to consume as little bandwidth and computer resources as possible. Nowadays nobody cares how bloated the website is, as long as the advertising income exceeds the costs of running it, you are in the black. Doubly so thanks to javascript, because now you can offload all the bloat onto your clients. Not only do their eyeballs earn you money, but they are paying for it via their electricity bill (and needing more and more beefy devices to render said content).
Quite frankly, I think the online advertisers imploding would make the internet a far better place than it currently is, and a lot of the crap and noise on it would go away because it would simply be unprofitable for someone to pay to keep it online.
The biggest irony for me is that Google, the biggest culprit of modern online advertising/tracking/privacy abuse, actually became popular precisely because in a world of search engines stuffed to the gills with adverts, they gave nothing but a clean page (especially the start page). That is what made them popular (the "Do no evil" motto was more just to cement themselves among the naive, and I guess it worked, until they got big enough to drop the charade and not bother with pretenses)
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:22PM (13 children)
If all websites published for profit disappeared from the Internet over the course of the next month, would only such hobby websites be enough to sustain a mass market for affordable home broadband Internet access?
Be careful, as "it" may bolster the economies of scale that keep the price of your Internet connection reasonable.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 27 2018, @05:45PM (11 children)
The for-profit websites I frequent typically are websites that don't make their money through advertising. They make their money by offering me actual service (like, letting me buy stuff online).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday September 27 2018, @06:48PM (10 children)
Yes I was going to say something similar. All the for profit sites I use I pay for, either directly, or via fees/commission.
As for broadband subsidy. I seem to remember the main reason for the mass explosion of internet was the discovery by the masses of piracy. Originally (for me) audiogalaxy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy, the 1998-2002 period). Then later on Kazaa, gnutella, edonkey, etc....
For a lot of people, paying more for broadband was worth it because of the amount of money they saved not having to buy music CDs, or DVD movies. ISPs in fact deliberately did not want to upset these heavy users, which is why they fought so bitterly against being responsible for cutting off pirates. Likewise it is when the fascination with "download speed" started, and they started competing on that (and that alone, a legacy that still haunts us, as nobody advertises their great upload speed, uptime, contention ratio, or "symmetric" lines to end users).
Quite frankly, I don't think online advertising contributed that much to subsidising internet access originally, and now, with the online video/audio streaming segment, the piracy segment, online gaming/banking/shopping, etc... we have plenty of reasons to be able to sustain a good infrastructure just fine without online advertisers, and with them the excuse for all the spying/privacy abuse will fade (because currently, anyone who wants to spy on you for whatever reason, can just state it is "for online advertising", and most people just accept that as a fact of life).
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday September 27 2018, @06:51PM (7 children)
Which has largely been replaced with ad-supported streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.
Much of which is ad-supported.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:08PM (6 children)
> Which has largely been replaced with ad-supported streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.
Not quite. For one Piracy is still rampant. Even bit-torrent is still a sizable bulk of net traffic, despite being the "out of date" method of piracy nowadays.
Secondly, There is a wealth of completely ad-free internet radio stations, most likely more than Pandora/Spotify, however not being a single "central" type business, it is very hard to gauge the total number of stations/listeners.
those ad-free internet radio stations existed before online advertising, and would exist after. Quite frankly I prefer them to spotify/pandora any day of the week.
> Much of which is ad-supported.
The only one I have used that has ads is youtube, and to be honest, if youtube vanished tomorrow it would not be the end of the world to me, at best it would be a mild irritation for a short time. Plenty of other places to get videos from. I would even consider paying for a youtube like subscription service if I really had the need for on-demand streaming video, or perhaps some kind of "pay-per-stream" in lieu of adverts.
Plenty of ways to adapt to a world without online advertising.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Pino P on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:12PM (1 child)
You prefer them. But do enough of your neighbors prefer them to make it profitable for your ISP to continue to offer your present level of service in your neighborhood?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:49PM
Does it matter? Internet radio is such a low bandwidth requirement that even if all my neighbours listened to it every day, or not at all, it would be the difference of a couple of megabits/s, not enough to subsidise broadband massively.
I am pretty sure that within the ISPs corporate structure, overall we provided a profit for them, otherwise they would not bother serving us. If demand for fast connections dropped (which I doubt would happen, pretty much everyone over here uses Iplayer or netflix/amazon, etc.. which are massive bandwidth hogs), then contention ratios would change to keep the balance, llowing those of us left either to utilise more of the pipe for a higher price, or utilise the same pipe for the same price.
I really don't see the logic in claiming I need all my neighbours to be digital gluttons just so I can have broadband. That makes no sense really, because we all have telephone lines, so if all my neighbours dropped their net connections tomorrow, I would get shunted onto another ring, and be on my merry way. The ISP may decide to shut down a ring to save some money after migrating us, and as a result costs would not change substantially.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 28 2018, @03:57AM (3 children)
" For one Piracy is still rampant. Even bit-torrent is still a sizable bulk of net traffic, despite being the "out of date" method of piracy nowadays."
What's the up-to-date method??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @05:58AM
RFC1149 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday September 28 2018, @11:52AM (1 child)
streamripping seems to be the most popular at the moment, as well as these "third party" streamer sites that have KODI Plugins, and which keep getting shut down.
I don't consider it a "better" method, just one that is more popular now (and hence why the IP industries have taken to prosecuting streamripping and KODI stream sites, and concentrating less on torrent sites).
I guess for the non computer nerds, far easier to get ahold of a pre-built Kodi box with these plugins, and just stream like you would netflix or whatever (plus instant gratification). Easier than faffing about with torrent sites/clients/magnet links, and then having to wait until it is downloaded, or for peers to come online, etc...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 28 2018, @02:04PM
Ah. For a moment I feared we were back to speeding station wagons.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday September 27 2018, @06:59PM (1 child)
Oh, and to add, online advertising is a big mis-allocation of resources. Due to online advertising, we have the concept of the "scrape scammer" as I call them. People who set up a blog/website, etc... and just scrape other peoples content off their sites/forums/newsgroups, and paste it on their site (only sometimes attributed), in no order, or even a consistent theme, on a page absolutely loaded with adverts and JS bullcrap.
They also somehow game Google (I presume by cross linking a lot between other scraper scam sites), to be at the top of the results. 90% of the time when I search for something, I hit these blasted sites. It has actually rendered Google search useless for me. It has reached a point when it is easier for me to go my library and look up something in a book then it is to crawl through a page or more of crap to reach it online, which is the exact opposite of how the internet used to be for me.
A lot of bullshit on the net is fueled by the money brought from advertising, indeed we now even have issues of people ripping off each others videos to try to get some ad-money, necessitating a dedicated law (DMCA seems to be used the most), and a per site team and infrastructure (more costs) just to police and pull down such attempts.
Really, online advertising drives a horrible cesspit of wasted resources and human effort worldwide. I guess offline advertising does the same, but they are limited by the laws of physics and man (i.e. the kind of spying they get away with online would not be allowed in real life, although with Alexa, smart appliances, etc.. the lines are blurring).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday September 28 2018, @02:10PM
And... I forget if it was Proctor & Gamble, or Johnson & Johnson, or ? & ?, but some company of that size and general type.... who as a test pulled ALL their ads for six months, and observed NO change in sales. Meaning at least in their sphere, where everyone needs their products and any store "advertises" it simply by putting it on the shelf (and the company has already paid for that product placement) -- the only beneficiaries of advertising are the marketing departments.
Worth noting that marketing departments (and ad agencies) don't exist to sell product; they exist to sell ad campaigns to companies that sell product (cuz otherwise they lose their jobs). And up to half of the product's retail price can be the cost of advertising. How many sales are lost because advertising jacks the price above what at least some consumers wish to pay? that'd be an interesting spreadsheet.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday September 27 2018, @08:52PM
Isn't most Internet bandwidth now paid streaming video? And number two is ad supported streaming video like YouTube. Traditional "Internet" is basically a free rider tagging along with Netflx and Hulu.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday September 27 2018, @06:11PM (4 children)
That seems very unfair to people who don't want to do anything yet still want money. Very unfair. People who don't want to work are being treated very unfairly. More unfairly than at any time in history.
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(Score: 4, Touché) by charon on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:17PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 27 2018, @08:17PM
I don't own that account. I didn't think of it first.
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(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday September 28 2018, @12:20PM (1 child)
Danny and I are just friends, just friends. He's a good man, doing well. We've been friends for a long time. Somehow there are comparisons made so often, which is interesting, comparisons between Danny and myself. I don’t quite get it. He’s said some very nice things about me in the past, and he knows my daughter a little bit, Ivanka. He said very good things about me. Extremely positive things.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 28 2018, @03:23PM
Thank you. I would be be very happy to be informed of any positive things I may have unintentionally said about you.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:05PM
Reality.
Telegraph, radio, TV, all started out the same way. Heck, most inventions / innovations start out with simple purposes / intentions. Then commerce happens.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday September 27 2018, @06:22PM (5 children)
I could tolerate advertising once. I grew up with it. It was universal. But tolerable.
Advertising destroys everything it touches. It cannot leave well enough alone. Sort of like corporate executives, this quarter results must exceed last quarter. Then they act surprised at the long term effect. BYTE magazine went from a great magazine, to being loaded with ads, and then eventually being the forerunner of Computer Shopper, nothing but ads.
Why do advertisements need to:
* add megabytes to a page load?
* play audio or video? Unasked, unbidden.
* display huge graphics?
* cover the entire page, obscuring the content?
* interrupt the content while you're reading it.
* pull in scripts from many different domains or IP addresses?
It was obvious to me that cable TV would die once:
* CNN got rid of investigative journalists and closed bureaus around the world, but pretended to have in depth news
* Reality TV became a thing
* 50% of cable tv programming time was ads
* ads increased the volume significantly
* after a long string of ads, the content would resume, and then more ads would walk out onto the actual tv program you were viewing, obscuring actual content -- sometimes content critical to the story
The same is happening to the web. But unlike cable, we have a choice. We can visit sites that we like, and avoid ones that are just plain obnoxious.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:09PM (4 children)
Because they contain video. See below.
Audio gets blocked until the user clicks play, until the user has opted into media playback on that site, or until enough other users of the same browser have opted into media playback on that site. Browsers allow muted video to play automatically because the fallbacks for not doing so are even less bandwidth-efficient. See Video blocking test suite [pineight.com] for the sort of scripted or contorted fallbacks that sites would use if browsers were to block even muted video from autoplaying.
All of these are attempts to break through banner blindness [wikipedia.org], for the same reason that print advertising has two-page spreads.
To build an interest dossier on each viewer that helps ensure that advertising is relevant to that viewer. A 2014 study (PDF) [politico.com] claims that a targeted ad impression is worth roughly three times as much as an untargeted impression. General-interest online publishers use targeting to draw ad money away from general-interest print publishers, which can't guarantee more targeting than a vague demographic. Online publishers using a print-style model to sell their ad space tend to do better if the site's subject matter is itself highly targeted, such as the IT subject matter of Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] and Read the Docs [readthedocs.io].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:34PM (3 children)
Ad blindness has always been and will always be. Trying to break through it may be short term effective, but long term self defeating. Advertisers will utterly fail to recognize any patterns here. People adapt and learn to not look at ads they are not interested in. If the ads become too offensive or obnoxious, then people will:
1. try to subvert or somehow avoid the ads (maybe, if they even try this step)
2. completely avoid the site once it is effectively unusable
Users go the a site for a purpose. And ads ain't it.
The advertisers, and their apologists will fail to recognize how advertising drives its own demise. Who to blame for ad blockers? The Advertisers themselves! They are unable to police or moderate themselves.
I haven't even touched yet on the topic that ad networks are effective ways to spread malware and scams. I'm just (falsely) assuming that all ads are benign and legitimate so far.
Advertisers will blame everyone but themselves. There are no limits on how far they will go when unchecked. I truly believe that when the technology is available, advertisers will try to put ads on the inside of everyone's eyelids. You may smirk, and not believe it. But it will happen. And for all of the reasons ad apologists give for why the web has to be so bad. And why cable TV ads had to get to such a bad situation. And radio ads. And magazine ads. And network tv ads. Etc, etc.
If I want home siding, I am resourceful enough to start searching for it and find what I want. Ditto for just about any other product you could insert into that sentence. And most other people are too. It's amazing how people will look for a commercial product when they have made up their mind to buy one or just shop for one.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday September 27 2018, @09:57PM (2 children)
Yeah, there are almost certainly very scary times ahead. Remember that article about a wi-fi powered tracking device that could fit into a label on a parcel? We're not too many decades away from self-charging, invasive electronics getting so small and cheap that the devices will begin infesting every room of every home. Sure mobiles and Internet of Things devices do that already to an extent but think insect sized and smaller and arriving under its own steam uninvited. Once you have that, it's only a few steps away from artificial parasites that crawl under your eyelids or into your ears, as you said. Nanotech research won't stop and there are more powerful organizations that want this sort of thing than people in power that can make a moral stand against it, so I can't see how it won't happen. *Shudders, then doffs tinfoil hat1*
1 Actually I think I'd better keep it on, thanks.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 28 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
I am reminded of Dune.
They had some very advanced tech. Applied sparingly.
They seemed almost technophobic.
Especially no computers, but instead Mentats.
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday September 29 2018, @06:59PM
Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man's mind.