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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: 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.