Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I too have a dial-up connection, and one of the things that I do a lot online is read documentation and manuals that I do not want to buy/print/download because of cost/too much paper/size, etc., but one thing that is useful is SSHing into my college account and running "links" to read it. I cannot see pictures, but who needs them? As for sites, Slashdot normally loads fairly fast on dial up without toning it down, and once I am used to the slow speed, even flash-intensive sites do not bother me much; however, I do use Yahoo! games on occasion, and there are quite a few sites that have lighter versions.
Use avantgo or palm based websites...
Like this one:
http://www.slashdot.org/palm
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I'm on dialup. I read all my news via RSS feeds. Web sites without feeds just don't exist (except maybe when I have to buy something and I have to delve into the sea of slow bloated incompatible crap).
Yeah, RSS is a "buzzword", whatever, but being able to put all this content in *my* choice of format, arranged by *date* rather than website, with no flash or ads or junk is just great.
I have a program download the feeds and prepare a static HTML file using XSLT.
Hey, 56k used to be faster than most :)
Anyway, I think it is a shame website designers are forgetting about you... if it helps, I do test most all of what we produce at work on a 28.8 modem. Of course, we also test for ADA compliance...
Anyway, try using Mozilla/Firefox with that plugin that launches Flash, etc. only when you want it. Also, use the userContent.css file to block ad servers, images that have "ads" in the path, etc. Perhaps get a copy of that hosts file that kills ads, counters, etc. as well. - http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
Also, set your browser cache to a slightly larger size (10-15mb maybe?) and set it to check for new stuff only once per session.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
From my own experience on broadband and what my friends who are stuck on 56k have told me, Gmail is quite awesome, even on a 56k.
There are some things the client can do to improve compression and caching. First, install wwwoffle, a caching http server which has an 'offline' mode so you can browse cached pages when not connected. If like me you really hate waiting for previously-viewed pages to download a second time, tweak the config file so it always uses cached copies when available. Then the Back button and viewing familiar sites will be lightning fast, but you'll need to hit Reload to get the latest version.
I've also found it useful to run a proxy server on a remote host with a fast connection and then tunnel the http proxy port (usually 3128 or 8080) over ssh. Then there is just a single ssh connection between your machine and the proxy, with everything over that being compressed and no overhead of setting up new TCP connections, DNS lookups and so on. This is really fast, but I have found that the ssh tunnelling tended to freeze and the connection needed to be killed and restarted. (That was a few years ago, the bug may now be fixed.) You could try RabbIT as the upstream proxy, compressing images and such before sending them down.
You can certainly combine all three - local wwwoffle, talking over a compressed ssh tunnel to RabbIT at a faster host...
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com