Slashdot Mirror

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web

Once again the *nix world has had this taken care of for years.

I posted about this an AC earlier today, but now that I'm back at home time to give some more info.

From the website:
"Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of
popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims
google, altavista, babelfish, dejanews, freshmeat, research index,
slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen
lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in
unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.

Surfraw abstracts the browser away from input. Doing so lets it get on
with what it's good at. Browsing. Interpretation of linguistic forms
is handed back to the shell, which is what it, and human beings are
good at. Combined with netscape-remote or incremental text browsers,
such as links (http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/), w3m
(http://www.w3m.org/), and screen(1) a Surfraw liberateur is capable
of navigating speeds that leave GUI tainted idolaters agape with fear
and wonder.

For example:

$ ask why is jeeves gay?
$ google -results=100 RMS, GNU, which is sinner, which is sin?
$ austlii -method=phrase dog like
$ rhyme -method=perfect Julian"

And obviously you can hack this to make it work with whatever website you could want to use. Much better than this YubNub stuff from my glance at it.

I could easily imagine a productive environment based around GNU screen and a terminal-based editor, mail client, news client, and IM client. Throw in something like w3m, and other for images, its good.

Yup, that's pretty close to the way I've worked for most of the last year or two. For me it's screen, of course, along with:

• editor - vim,
• mail client - mutt,
• news client - tin,
• web client(s) - a combination of w3m, lynx, and wget for most downloading tasks,
• spreadsheet - sc, which is surprisingly useful,
• P2P client - mutella, though I think there are console options for other protocols,
• IM/IRC client - irssi along with the fantastic bitlbee (and if you haven't heard of bitlbee before, take a look).

...and then I use good 'ol ratpoison for my window manager in X for the occasions that I need graphics (ie. some web browsing, viewing PDFs, playing graphical games).

Strike that. In most cases, multi-tasking can be very counterproductive. Shell escapes and $EDITOR_OF_CHOICE is good enough.

It varies :-), though I agree generally speaking. I'm using KDE3.2beta at the moment for a bit of a change, though most of the action is still inside my screen(1) terminal(s). You do tend to (or at least I tend to) find yourself more productive when you don't have stray graphical bits and pieces around the place to distract you.

Of course if you need the GUI for your normal working environment (ie. you're developing a GUI app), then, well there's not much you can do but live with it. :)

Here. Phoenix^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFirebird allows you to block certain Javascript functions (like popups, window resizing, status bar text, etc) without disabling Javascript entirely. On the other hand, if you do want to disable Javascript entirely, take a look at w3m.

Anyway, what I want to do is run linux on my k6-2 333 or heaven forbid my p1-100 and still be able to browse the web.

This is what I like the most about open source software; the diversity that is a natural consequence of the open-source model has resulted in a number of browsers:

• Mozilla
• Galeon
• Konqueror
• SkipStone

There are also some proprietary browsers:

• Netscape. All of the browsers can be freely downloaded, and Netscape Communicator will work fine on the Pentium 100 machine.
• Opera

- Sam

Second, don't just bitch about IE. If you haven't already, check out the alternatives:

• Mozilla, now in Version 0.9.6, is very feature-rich and fast and the most standard-compliant browser in existence, but not for computers with less than 128 MB of memory.
• kmeleon (Windows) and galeon (Linux) are Mozilla derivatives with smaller footprint.
• Opera, which is closed source adware and requires registration, is a very fast browser that is especially recommended for "information surfers" because of its excellent navigation and caching.
• Konqueror is KDE's built-in browser. Thanks to Qt/Embedded and/or KDE-Cygwin, it might be ported to Windows as well.
• Lynx and W3M are up-to-date text mode browsers capable of displaying most pages which do not depend on images or animations.

and w3m is still lynx done right!