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.
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Use a proxy like privoxy or junkbuster (outdated, only does HTML 1.0, try privoxy first).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
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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
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?
Jay | http://oldos.org
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.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
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
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Does that mean it contains Flouride?
4 out of 5 dentists recommend ADA compliant websites.
Unknown host pong.
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.