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

SSH

[brilinux]

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.

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Use a proxy like privoxy or junkbuster (outdated, only does HTML 1.0, try privoxy first).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