Dial-Up Friendly Websites?

rinkjustice asks: "I'm one of those unlucky souls damned to dial-up internet access. I've been trying to make the best of the situation, however: I use the stripped-down Slashdot homepage, and my kids are slowly acclimatising to dial-up friendly gaming fare ala Games.com, Yahoo! Games instead of bandwidth clotting MMORPG's like RuneScape. What other fun, interesting websites cater to the 56k crowd? Are there any websites specifically 'optimized' for a lo-bandwidth audience?"

Comments

Doesn't have to be lose/lose

[friedegg]

There are plenty of things you can do that aren't lose/lose:

1. Use mod_gzip (or equivalent) to compress text pages. It's a small cpu hit on the server (less if you cache the gziped output), but it pays off in reduced bandwidth costs for you and faster page loads for users.

2. Use properly compressed PNGs rather than GIFs for line art/text graphics. If at all possible, use actual text with styles instead of graphics.

3. Use proper (X)HTML and CSS. They'll compress better if they're valid, and if you use external CSS files, users can cache them.

4. Set correct expiration headers on pages/graphics to let the user's browser know how long it can cache them.

Re:Doesn't have to be lose/lose

[friedegg]

You can actually use the latest versions of Putty as a dynamic socks5 proxy (works with most browsers, mail clients, etc), so you don't even need a real proxy server, just an SSH connection that allows tunnelling.