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

block the ads, cache everything!

[molo]

If you greatly want to decrease page load time, I suggest blocking the advertisements. They are often in an iframe, resulting in at least 2 GETs per image (not to mention html parsing). They are also kept on different servers usually, so you can't reuse your current HTTP session, you have to start a new one, with a TCP 3-way handshake that can take upwards of half a second on a modem (especially one with the bandwidth already saturated loading the rest of the page).

Use a proxy like privoxy or junkbuster (outdated, only does HTML 1.0, try privoxy first). Or, get a browser plugin to do the same (for example, AdBlock for FireFox).

Then setup a Squid caching proxy to keep you from repeating DNS lookups and retrieving the same page or image. This gives a huge boost, since images can be loaded from memory or disk instead of a network roundtrip. The more disk and memory you throw at Squid, the more cache hits you get.

BTW, junkbuster can be configured to use another proxy (like Squid) so you can use both together. I think privoxy will do that too.

Oh, one last thing.. if you know any web site admins, get them to turn on apache's mod_gzip compression. It compresses pages for http transmission and saves oodles of bandwidth. Most popular sites use it. Browsers like IE and Mozilla support it. Any decent cache (squid) will support it too.

These kind of changes make browsing over modem much more tolerable. Good luck.

-molo

Web designers are in a lose/lose

[oldosadmin]

I hear all these posts saying "why do you not care about 56k users, webmasters, boo hoo"... well, the bottom line is, it's a lose/lose situation.

I run the site www.oldos.org, and I moved to a layout which loads probably about 4 times faster than the old layout, just to get fussed by a ton of people saying they hate it.

Make up your mind! Do you want fast or dancing babies?

Re:Great, put us all out of business.

[molo]

Display is up to the client. Deal with it. The client may chose to ignore your stylesheet or your color scheme or your images.

If your revenue model doedn't work with the realities of the general purpose web technology, which do you think is flawed, the revenue model or the technology?

And I suppose browsing with text mode browsers or by blind people rob you of your revenue too? Get real.

-molo