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The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute. It does seem

The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute. It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.

thenthenthen 1mo ago
It is an experiment, over the years various people have contributed “odd-looking” optimisations, its a great project!
- schiffern 1mo ago
  More info: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h... https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html IMO the only optimization they 'missed' is to pre-compress the static files and images on disk, since it's cheaper to decompress on-the-fly if the client doesn't support gzip. The could use zopfli to "extra compress" the most frequently accessed files, and use this as a solar dump load to usefully burn extra power when the batteries are full (perhaps compressing with gzip -1 when Pelican re-builds the static site, or even avoid pre-compression altogether during the build process. https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.html https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.h... https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress

thenthenthen 1mo ago

It is an experiment, over the years various people have contributed “odd-looking” optimisations, its a great project!

schiffern 1mo ago
More info: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h... https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html IMO the only optimization they 'missed' is to pre-compress the static files and images on disk, since it's cheaper to decompress on-the-fly if the client doesn't support gzip. The could use zopfli to "extra compress" the most frequently accessed files, and use this as a solar dump load to usefully burn extra power when the batteries are full (perhaps compressing with gzip -1 when Pelican re-builds the static site, or even avoid pre-compression altogether during the build process. https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.html https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.h... https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress