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.
Related Stories
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: 2) by Snotnose on Friday January 26 2018, @04:10AM (1 child)
It's for the advertisers, who think that the more crap they send at me the better chance of something sticking to the wall.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday January 30 2018, @02:06PM
Yup - it's the reason adblockers are being baked into browsers these days.
It's not that the browser vendors are opposed to online advertising, but the sheer data wastage seriously worsens the browsing experience. (Even ignoring the overly-intrusive aspect of many adverts.)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:16AM (2 children)
It weighs in at zero bits.
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Friday January 26 2018, @04:50AM
Hey, me too! I use PigZip [hackles.org] to keep it light.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 26 2018, @06:26PM
Yeah, posting you thoughts onto some kind of website is totally stupid!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday January 26 2018, @04:26AM (8 children)
I Use RSS, even for SoylentNews, I can blast through a whole day's worth of stories and decide if I want to call any of them up.
Maybe you don't want to block ads on your favorite blog site. (If you don't click the ads you might as well block them - saves everybody bandwidth charges).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:50AM
That's a very inefficient way to waste time.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday January 26 2018, @11:32AM (3 children)
Reminder to self: migrate my webpages to gopher...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @12:49PM (2 children)
Just wait for RSS 2.0 - now with RSSScript!
/joke... I hope?
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday January 26 2018, @04:00PM
Joke's on you; RSS 2.0's been a thing for many moons now. It's a pile of XML that lets you embed HTML and whatever else you want in it. I haven't seen scripts yet but some sites embed stock photos and tracking images.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Friday January 26 2018, @04:02PM
I think it could be done. RSS + CSS + JavaScript... what could go wrong? Flash support? ActiveX? No problem! Wait! Lots of problems, just how you like it! Let me tell you the wonders of Java applets and how! There's a whole internet waiting to be downloaded and with RSScript you can see it as how the advertisers had wanted.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday January 26 2018, @09:58PM (2 children)
I like the idea of RSS, but I have never been able to find any command line tools that will work with it (something I can plug into a cron script, not a tui). I understand there's some python library for it, but I can't be bothered to roll my own for something that would only provide a small efficiency boost to my workflow.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @11:16PM (1 child)
You mean like https://vanheusden.com/rsstail/ [vanheusden.com]
(The SN feed is at https://soylentnews.org/index.rss) [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday January 26 2018, @11:47PM
Looking at the man page quickly, it seems like exactly what I want, thanks!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Apparition on Friday January 26 2018, @04:30AM (16 children)
As worthy as the goal of keeping websites light is, having a 25MB per month limit and honestly expecting to be able to use the Internet just fine all month long shows that you haven't been paying attention to the Internet at all the past fifteen years or so. Between three people, my household uses an average of two terabytes of data per month without use of any kind of file-sharing. Granted, most of that is video streaming and video games but still.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:42AM (5 children)
Family of Windows 10 users, eh?
(Score: 4, Informative) by chromas on Friday January 26 2018, @04:58AM (4 children)
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Friday January 26 2018, @08:20AM (3 children)
Sounds more like Windows Fail Creator...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday January 26 2018, @05:22PM (2 children)
So you don't think it sounds like the fall of Windows?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:52PM (1 child)
i think the answer is then that 25MB is actually the average on my smartphone when I am not on my wifi at home
i read typical news on it. i am not reading someones blog... but I may come here or similar forums like those 'small machine forums' set up and frequented by people that care about a few specific topics. usually the biggest bandwidth is the avatar and links to something else...
first it was the cloud -- keeping things local to the home network became very hard to do with new products.. then came windows 10, which broke new ground in how to waste bandwidth going out and cominb back into the home...and driving up costs for everyone that has to pay for a connection because cloud
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 26 2018, @11:54PM
Tapping the Cancel button twice has become muscle memory for me.
I filed a bug with the title that "App Store Doesn't Believe 'No' Means No" but so far I've gotten no response from Apple.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by arcz on Friday January 26 2018, @06:01AM (9 children)
What kind of video game uses that much bandwidth??
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Friday January 26 2018, @06:30AM (2 children)
Purchasing a AAA-class game on PlayStation Store or Steam often entails downloading a BD-ROM's worth of data. This can be in the tens of gigabytes. Add multiple gamers in the household, and you end up with a start even before you add hours of high-definition Twitch streaming.
(Score: 1) by Apparition on Friday January 26 2018, @12:29PM (1 child)
Not to mention multi-gigabyte video game patches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:21PM
Which are conveniently distributed via bittorrent so the dev (for example blizzard) doesn't need to pay the bandwidth bills. You do.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 26 2018, @10:30AM (5 children)
The freemium ones and even most of the for-pay ones. They'll telemetrize your behaviour to the kingdom come and then one more station past it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 26 2018, @03:34PM (4 children)
This is why it's best to just ignore modern games, and stick with the old classics. They don't require an internet connection, they don't spy on you, and they're more fun too.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday January 26 2018, @05:27PM (2 children)
These are the two games I keep coming back to, year after year after year:
http://www.oolite.org/ [oolite.org]
https://www.wesnoth.org/ [wesnoth.org]
No snooping, no massive bandwidth/ data requirements, plenty of customisation options and user-generated content. Oh, and free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:39PM
Oolite is awesome, one of my all time favorites. I kinda burned myself out on wesnoth though. ADOM, MAngband, and dwarf fortress on the roguelike end, have all devoured many days of my life.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday January 28 2018, @11:10PM
Thanks for the recommendation. I just whiled away the last couple of hours in Oolite on Linux. It's come a long way since I tried it out years ago! Great to see they're still improving it and I suppose Mr Braben must be a bit more tolerant (or ambivalent) towards people writing such things these days.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 26 2018, @11:56PM
hey - who's that there.
He's got a gun!
O for the love of God don't take the life of my mama's little boy!
BANG!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:52AM (1 child)
It takes up all available space.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:01AM
It was at one time quiet a prosperous Multimedia CD shop. Most of our clients were big companies such as Northern Telecom who hired us to put all their sales lit on a single CD with an attractive UI.
We had an application framework of sorts:
Start with all the source code from the previous Multimedia CD.
Add new code that does whatever the client requests that wasn't already implemented by that last project.
Never Ever Ever remove any source code.
After three or four years those codebases were truly a sight to behold.
But then the Internet happened. They sold the company to AOL who was interested only in our graphic artists. Did you ever use AOL around '95 or '96? The buttons you saw on the first screen were all done by Medior's artists.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @05:17AM (3 children)
Most summaries here are just a few paragraphs copy pasted verbatim from the source article. Canopic jug took the time to write this summary.
Not trying to shame others (thanks all for submitting stories), but just wanted to compliment canopic jug for taking the extra effort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @06:06AM (1 child)
Seconded. <3
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 26 2018, @11:57PM
Among the reasons that I don't submit many stories is that I just don't have the headspace to write up a proper post rather than jacking a few paragraphs from the original article.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by Roo_Boy on Friday January 26 2018, @03:32PM
Living up to his namesake I suppose, all the best bits pulled out and stored for later :D
--- The S.I. prototype "Average Punter" is kept in a tube of inert gas in Geneva.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Pino P on Friday January 26 2018, @05:31AM (8 children)
From the featured article:
What's the best way to use a static website generator yet be able to post from a device other than my home desktop computer, such as a phone or tablet that I carry while out and about?
Good luck with that for photographers. Even a page of highly compressed photo thumbnails can exceed that, especially if the browser has to fall back from WebP to JPEG or the like. The article recommends using SVG, which is good for some but not all cases.
If you plan to put a lot of time into your writing, but your blog isn't quite as well known as (say) Daring Fireball, good luck finding sponsors for a script-free, analytics-free blog.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @08:18AM (2 children)
What? It's a blog, FFS, why do you need sponsors? It's basically a public online version of the old fashioned diary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @10:01PM
Well, I think the problem that happened is that people are trying to make their blag a significant source of income.
I've had blags on and off, but found I never really had much of value to say. (That's why I post here instead!) Easy to host myself since I'm already paying $20/month for a server in the clouds that I let people I know use. (I have other uses for it that aren't http also.)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:23AM
-g:
http://seeingtheforest.com [seeingtheforest.com]
"Former Presidents read my blog!"
I knew it just had to be Jimmy Carter - and it was.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 26 2018, @10:34AM (1 child)
Maybe Jekyll style? - https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-as-a-static-site-generator-with-github-pages/ [github.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday January 26 2018, @12:39PM
sudo mod me up
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:09PM
photographers? what are you talking about?
of course pictures take up space. the guy is talking about a blog--text and words, not grandmas scrapbook
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:06AM
The reason caches don't work anymore is because web analytics.
Suppose your page has a legitimate use for jQuery. That's a heavyweight resource but it only has to download once.
Think Again:
Safari used to have this really useful Activity window that listed the URLs of all the resources that go into each page, as well as their size.
When I started getting into looking at Activity I was dismayed to all-too-often find:
http://code.google.com/jQuery?tracking-id=12345678&browser=safari&referring-page=http://goat.cx [google.com]
Sometimes the names of the query parameters made it explicitly clear that the only reason for that parameter was to defeat caching.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:00AM (3 children)
Even soylentnews takes about 130kB (80KB plus some images). So 20 to 30 SN loads/pages and that's more than 25MB.
25MB/month is for stuff like instant text messaging, not regular blog viewing.
What he's doing is even dumber than telling bloggers to post photos of cheaper food and drinks so that he can afford to try the same stuff on a $25/month budget.
There are probably bloggers who have very light blogs. You don't know about them? Go figure.
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Friday January 26 2018, @08:43AM
Even soylentnews takes about 130kB (80KB plus some images). So 20 to 30 SN loads/pages and that's more than 25MB.
In my Universe, 130kB x 30 = 3900 kB = 3.9 MB, and 3.9 25.
Using your numbers, 25 MB would give 192 page loads, or an average of a little over 6 page loads a day.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday January 26 2018, @11:42AM
This page, before posting this post, is, according to Pale Moon's "Page Info", 15.28 KB (15,651 bytes)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:10AM
There are very few images on my site. IIRC there is just one Javascript that has the same URL from all the pages that use it.
My very largest document is 50 pages in hardcopy form. Let's see how big it is:
$ du -s /var/warplife/www/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/
392 /var/warplife/www/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/
That's 392,000 bytes for a fifty page document that is on a reading list that the California State Mental Health Department distributes to its county clinics.
I used to have two Google AdSense units on just one page but I removed them when their earnings had gone way down.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by KritonK on Friday January 26 2018, @09:25AM (3 children)
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:
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 26 2018, @03:20PM (2 children)
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
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
As bog standard as this used to be, now people seem surprised when you suggest this...
Many people are way too rich.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:58AM
I agree some devs don't (care any) more about keeping things light but with a restriction like the one he is facing it's his problem to overcome...
Turn off all images and scripts in the browser, use something like dillo or lynx. Go through a proxy that strips away even more for you (like in the early 2000s, designed for phones of that era). Set up a dedicated ptp dialup to someone with real internet.
Whatever he has to do, it's on him.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Bot on Friday January 26 2018, @10:32AM (3 children)
1. javascript off
2. auto load images off
3. site does not work? GO ELSEWHERE
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @04:25PM
If you're going to browse like that just use Lynx.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @07:11PM (1 child)
cant believe this is informative
its like i was born in the wrong era. everyone should already know this right? please?
to use less bandwidth you can actually change settings and stuff? oh wait if you use chrome i guess they sort of dumb it down while adding freedom or something which is why all the geeks that dont
ahh
i am going back to my bridge and will post again from my apple newton. at least it wont even render these stupid graphics. never found a working version of lynx for it tho
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday January 27 2018, @07:54PM
> i am going back to my bridge
This is a very outspoken troll...
Account abandoned.
(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