An HTML-only version of the site for people with crappy Interent

[H0R53]

GMail has a nice feature that lets you load an HTML-only version of the page for slow connections. I change ISPs frequently (for anonymity purposes mostly but also for sampling providers in the area) so at best my connection is inconsistent. My current ISP has a very unstable connection, speeds seem to rise and fall with no correlation to anything at all. I know that coding in HTML is a pain in the ass but it's less for me to load and I'm sure others may enjoy having to wait less to browse the forums.

[KuJoe]

Get a browser plugin to make your browser act like a smartphone, then you'll be able to browse the site with the mobile theme which is much better on bandwidth.

[H0R53]

57 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Get a browser plugin to make your browser act like a smartphone, then you'll be able to browse the site with the mobile theme which is much better on bandwidth.

I have a phone already.

[KuJoe]

1 minute ago, H0R53 said:

I have a phone already.

Problem solved?

[colonel_mortis]

The mobile version is exactly the same as the dekstop version, and doesn't use any less bandwidth.

 

The page is written in HTML, along with CSS for styling (which every site, including gmail "html only" mode, uses). There is also javascript, but the page is fairly functional without javascript, and the JS loading should not block the page loading.

The HTML and CSS files are fairly large, but unfortunately that's not something that we can do anything about. Most of the content should be cached though, so reducing the size is unlikely to make a massive difference after the first load.

[OLS]

http://www.opera.com/turbo

Works like a charm.

 

In earlier version you had more settings so you could choose quality of images and stuff like that. Not sure if that still works on Windows, currently on my Mac so unable to check for you.

[LogicalDrm]

Plus, you can have addons which block images from loading. Not having all the .gifs will do wonders.

[YoloSwag]

I think he's asking for a barebone version of the website. No styles. Just plain text and and all. Like the old html websites

 

TBH though, I think it would be entirely different and could be additional work and not like they just remove some stuff since it still should behave like a proper forum.

[LogicalDrm]

3 hours ago, YoloSwag said:

I think he's asking for a barebone version of the website. No styles. Just plain text and and all. Like the old html websites

 

TBH though, I think it would be entirely different and could be additional work and not like they just remove some stuff since it still should behave like a proper forum.

Once when forum was updating, I had that kinda thing. Wasn't any faster. It was ton slower.

[mariushm]

I think it wouldn't be that hard to add some options users could enable or disable ... like for example :

* don't load avatars and those small logos/icons/whatever under some users.   or load only static avatars  (for example YoloSwag 's  avatar a couple of posts above is 1 MB which is cached by the browser but in a few days it's most likely deleted to make room for other content user stumbles upon)

* don't load user signatures - most users probably don't care about those signatures, with lots of links and computer configurations for some users.

* may also disable the reputation system (the agree/funny/whatever to load less javascript on the page and waste less vertical space)

* oh ... maybe would be worth removing the almost 700 bytes html comment from the source code of the page .. granted. it probably compresses in less than 200 bytes, but still when the whole page is 38 KB, you're wasting 1 KB (about 2% of the traffic) of that with something nobody 99.99% of visitors never look at

 

With the cache emptied, this page was loaded in about 8.5 seconds, about 94 requests were made (for icons, avatars, javascripts etc) and about 6.8 MB were downloaded.  Naturally, next page accesses won't load that much as most would be cached but for users with lousy internet connection it still sucks.

 

I have 500 mbps down / 25 up  internet connection so i don't mind, but I'm aware of less fortunate users.

 

ps. Looks like Signatures can actually be disabled .. account settings > signatures > turn them off there.

[KuJoe]

8 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

The mobile version is exactly the same as the dekstop version, and doesn't use any less bandwidth.

That's disappointing to hear. I never considered responsive themes to be bad in anyway until now.

[Voakie]

18 hours ago, KuJoe said:

That's disappointing to hear. I never considered responsive themes to be bad in anyway until now.

Well, a responsive theme just means that the website you are viewing will scale nicely to your screen resolution, so you can still use it perfectly fine on any device (Except smartwatches  ). Not having a responsive website would mean that it wouldn't only take long to load, but would be unuseable.  

 

A HTML only version of the forum is definitly possible, but then it would literally only be text. No replying and liking. I'm not familiar with the software this forum uses, but you probably don't even get anything, depending on how it is loaded. 

 

Your only real approach would be to block images, as far as I know.

[KuJoe]

5 minutes ago, Voakie said:

Well, a responsive theme just means that the website you are viewing will scale nicely to your screen resolution, so you can still use it perfectly fine on any device (Except smartwatches  ). Not having a responsive website would mean that it wouldn't only take long to load, but would be unuseable.

I know that, I've been using responsive themes for so long but I never considered that the theme still loaded the whole page regardless of the device. Back in the day websites that were "mobile friendly" had two different themes, one for desktop and one for mobile/tablet. There was a few lines of JS/PHP/CSS to detect which site was best for the viewer and served the correct theme accordingly. This was great because it would make the website accessible to all devices while saving bandwidth for those on mobile. I guess with larger data caps and faster mobile speeds those days are long gone.

[Voakie]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

I know that, I've been using responsive themes for so long but I never considered that the theme still loaded the whole page regardless of the device. Back in the day websites that were "mobile friendly" had two different themes, one for desktop and one for mobile/tablet. There was a few lines of JS/PHP/CSS to detect which site was best for the viewer and served the correct theme accordingly. This was great because it would make the website accessible to all devices while saving bandwidth for those on mobile. I guess with larger data caps and faster mobile speeds those days are long gone.

You're right, I made my first sites just like that... But I guess the problem is that users with fast mobile connections don't want to miss out on content that the PC guys get to see. I've often caught myself switching to Desktop view (or whatever it's called) just to find what I knew was there, but just didn't fit on a mobile screen in a fancy manner.

 

But hey, Phones are getting bigger all the time anyways. Actual smartphones are probably a rarity right now, they should be called phablets. Or tones. Photablets.

[Syntaxvgm]

I'm kinda mini-necroing this thread, but I thought I'd add something to this. 

This is first load (fresh browser sessions) of LTT with images disabled 

Now with some stuff cached, here's a busy thread

Now, you see that big file on top? 398 kilobytes? That's the base JS file, and past that is the actual stuff from the topic. Subsequent loads will look like this 

You can disables images on this site only in chrome if you want, and I think there's some plugs to do stuff like click to load. Once you cache the main stuff for the site like buttons, you can chose to load topic images. Still too big? THis site actually works with javascript disabled, I tested it. That said, that's not the problem here. The problem on a slow connection is the number of separate requests, and aside making their own version of IPS with blackjack and hookers, there's nothing they can do here. 

 

[samiscool51]

if you man just text and no css or java script then that can be accomplished by a plugin

i don't know of any that do this but a adblocker probably will speed up your webpage

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom

[colonel_mortis]

10 hours ago, samiscool51 said:

if you man just text and no css or java script then that can be accomplished by a plugin

i don't know of any that do this but a adblocker probably will speed up your webpage

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom

For many sites, an adblocker can help, but this site only has one ad, which has been designed such that it won't slow down the page load in any appreciable way.

[Himommies]

On 2/1/2017 at 9:43 AM, YoloSwag said:

I think he's asking for a barebone version of the website. No styles. Just plain text and and all. Like the old html websites

 

TBH though, I think it would be entirely different and could be additional work and not like they just remove some stuff since it still should behave like a proper forum.

Essentially reddit

[antimattertape]

I see people spewing incorrect facts about web development and it's making me angry.

 

If you want to know what's slowing down the site for mobile users use this https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flinustechtips.com%2Fmain%2F

 

and yes images are a problem for mobile but responsive themes dont have to load slowly on slow connections, if you make your site properly then you can have pretty much anything load quickly.

[Sniperfox47]

On 28/02/2017 at 10:32 AM, antimattertape said:

I see people spewing incorrect facts about web development and it's making me angry.

 

If you want to know what's slowing down the site for mobile users use this https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flinustechtips.com%2Fmain%2F

 

and yes images are a problem for mobile but responsive themes dont have to load slowly on slow connections, if you make your site properly then you can have pretty much anything load quickly.

To be fair, I don't think they can really fix that stuff because of the BB software they're using.

 

It's a matter of waiting for upstream to fix it and inheriting those fixes, and companies building BB software are notoriously bad for not giving two "f"s about optimization.

[mariushm]

They could hire a programmer to write a script that would periodically go through the database - the user profile table - and process the avatar image for each user. If it's external url, download a copy locally and change the url in the database to a local url  ex images.linustechtips.com/avatars/12/1234/123456890.jpg  which can be transparently cached through CDN or whatever.

 

Once the image is local, have the script rename the image to filename.ORIGINAL.extension or whatever, and create a thumbnail version of the image as filename.extension in the resolution most commonly downloaded (ex 90x90 pixels) and maybe also create other versions (name them filename.120x120.extension for example) but the page that creates the profile page  would have to be modified to add 120x120 in the name ( or you could just give up and leave it serve the original big images there, as most likely the profile pages aren't accessed by users so often)

 

Creating more than a single thumbnail (the most commonly used by the skin) will be a trade-off between how much bandwidth is saved vs how much extra disk space is used vs how much extra unique files would be created on disk, how much image data  you would cache in systems like memcached, how many unique objects would be in a CDN etc - personally if my hunch is correct that the profile pages are rarely used, i'd rather have the forum software upscale a 90x90 avatar to 120x120 than resize a 480x480 image down to 120x120.

 

I see in the profile pages the tiny images at each post/update/whatever, they're the avatars resized to 44x44 px ... just make it 45x45 px and then browser would do a super fast bilinear resize from 90x90px to 45x45 px (1/2) ... it's not like you'd retain much more detail by resizing a 480x480 pixel image to 44x44 px  

I'm saying 480x480 because that's the size of @Sniperfox47's avatar so that's the first i checked when writing this - there are much larger avatars, and bigger... for example see @YoloSwag's 1 MB gif : https://linustechtips.com/main/profile/112399-yoloswag/

 

The script can run in background and simply periodically check what avatars are changed (look at last modified time on disk, or if the database has profile last updated time etc) and process them and the forum software is not changed in any way.

 

Anyway.. that's one solution.

 

The other would be to modify the forum software to replace the replace all the links to thumbnails to point to some script that serves the right thumbnail, without browser having to downscale or upscale.. ex have something like   images.linustechtips.com/image/avatar/12345678.image or  images.linustechtips.com/image/profile120/87654321.image and then have some url_rewrite rules which convert this on the server side to  something like images.linustechtips.com/serve_image.php?userid=12345678&template=avatar  or images.linustechtips.com/serve_image.php?userid=87654321&template=profile120 where template tells the script to serve a particular version of the thumbnail (original or 90x90 px or 120x120px or 44x44px non-animated etc)

 

(i'm using a subdomain "images" so that you potentially get the extra benefit of browsers not sending on each request cookies the forum software puts on the main domain and huge header data  - also easier to CDN-ify it separately from services like Cloudfront  - you may want to do this for situations like when user changes avatar and you want to purge thumbnails from old avatar from caches so that the script will create new ones on demand, with separate cdn you could simply send a request to delete the old objects and have the old cached copies purged, not sure if Cloudfront has such features free or cheap)

 

The script then serves the proper image in the proper resolution based on the "template" ... resample larger images, do or don't resample smaller images, keep or don't keep aspect ratio, add or don't add transparent borders to make image an exact resolution (and serve the image as png with transparent background in such situation) , allow or don't allow animation in the image - for example if image is a gif, maybe don't animate the 44x44 px image to left of each post as it's pointless.

Creation only needs to be done once per image, then it can be cached to memcached, or a sql memory table, or cached to a "image cache" SSD, or fall back down to mechanical hdd .. further the url will be cached by CDNs and browsers and so on. 

Downside is you have the need for this extra service (more resources on the serverat least at the beginning, cpu cycles and disk space to create the thumbnails and ability to run your own scripts) but you have the benefit of controlling user experience better.

 

[Sniperfox47]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

~very long snip~

Or you know they can just politely ask again for upstream to fix their code, and save the money on hiring a web developer.

[ARikozuM]

What's HTML?

Spoiler

Just kidding.

I don't think LTT can fix the website for mobile users since there isn't much that they can do. It's mostly up to users to not post 6 images in one post or, at the very least, use spoilers.

[2FA]

5 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

What's HTML?

  Reveal hidden contents

Just kidding.

I don't think LTT can fix the website for mobile users since there isn't much that they can do. It's mostly up to users to not post 6 images in one post or, at the very least, use spoilers.

 

That and it uses IP.Board