The 512KB Club
512kb.club
512kb.club
Edit: Just noticed https://lichess.org/ is on the list
You're answering the questions a visitor has in a sensible enough order:
1. What is it?
2. Why should I use it?
3. What does it look like?
I think the proportions are off. In terms of detail, the first question is answered in a brief slogan that is very easily glossed over because it's put in a place where very little informative text usually gets put, then the second question gets a huge amount of space and details and the same points are repeated multiple times with different phrasing. Everyone claims to be "fast", "simple", "effective", "secure", "private", "cheap", "future-proof", "optimized", etc. It very easily gets dismissed as noise when you are at the same time scanning the page for clues as to what it even is about. It's hard to make a sell when what you're selling isn't clear.
Maybe you could overlap 1 and 2 a bit, somehow. If it had said "the encoding scheme is easy to use" rather than "easy to use", my question would be largely answered.
My sites aren't a marvel of intuitive navigation either, I don't claim to be better, but it's sometimes hard to see sometimes how other people view our sites.
I'll play around with the positioning and ordering to see if I can make it easier to find answers to the primary questions.
I've been approaching it in terms of visitor archetypes, like in the case just now of a person who doesn't know what you're about, or someone looking for the spec, etc. What questions do they have, and can it be answered easily.
I also think being deliberate about where you draw attention to is big. Colors, images, do they serve a function or are they merely to fulfill an aesthetic? Regardless of why you put them there, for better or worse, they will draw the eyes of your visitors. Possibly away from what they are looking for.
I get the feeling that the page is at a "roughly good enough" phase that the largest segment of people can find it and get a little interested (or at least I hope that's the case!) The fine tuning is always a pain.
The main page is supposed to be a little markety, and then for the technically minded there's the spec and the design doc.
I've played around with what gets emphasized first. It used to be the dual format aspect, but now since switching to the security aspect I've gotten more traction.
It's always a struggle striking the right balance between information and text density. I'll probably end up playing around for awhile yet...
[1] https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/7PvRciZS/
edit: 215kb after removing unnecessary js third-parties (instant.page and CF rocket loader) https://gtmetrix.com/reports/golang.cafe/Xey7C7LM/
ps: also the site is not a static site, it connects to postgresql and serves 2,000 requests daily on avg
I was diagnosing some problems with latencies and it turns out that CF adds a good 200 ms to my page loads (making them load at about 400ms instead of 200ms*), meanwhile, their own tests claim they're able to reduce my page loads down to a roaring 700 ms from the 1 second default.
* depending on location
You could also mark the company images as `loading="lazy"` – though you may intentionally be eagerly loading all of those now.
Perhaps one approach would be to have an old-school web directory, like https://href.cool/ where you have a little screenshot and blurb about why a site is notable or worth visiting.
so this member checks his internet consumption and has a little shock seeing that he seems to have burnt over 5GB in a few hours, which were especially odd since he could not remember having done anything special, as some practical reasons rendered it impossible in that timeframe. He started suspecting malware.
Than it dawned on him: in those hours he spent time scrolling one page in Reddit. Ludicrous as it is, that remains the only relevant voluntary activity.
And then he planned to start monitoring consumption systematically through `iftop` (which also needs permanent in-session memory of total consumption per address/domain, by the way).
No, that car was bought by a friend of mine who relocated to Mexico, and found out he could buy one even though he didn't know how to drive. Hence the end result.
Bizarrely a while later he bought another one and crashed that too. Poor guy has plate in his head now holding his skull together.
Most people find the benefits of small websites to be all that compelling. And most businesses seem to be responding to the incentives imposed by this state of affairs. I would love to see a listing of popular websites that are very compact.
It's also withstood two HN "hugs of death", peaking out at multiple visits-per-second (a few dozen RPS). For what it's worth, it's hosted on a consumer-grade PC off domestic broadband.
It feels like the list is pointless, it’s saying “small sites are small” - instead of showcasing well-optimized sites that you would expect to be quite large.
Here’s my submission to usurp first place:
<p>lelandfe’s siteIt feels rather... pointless? to pick on a news organization's homepage for being bloated, and then gesture at some guy's 9kB portfolio saying "see! this is speed!"
The Nytimes website with the exact same look and functionality could be well under 1MB easily.
Yeah... 512 KB is a lot of bytes for text-only website. For text-only sites the threshold should be much lower. Like ten times lower. 50 KB club anyone?
I agree. I still think the website with one of the highest content-to-form ratio is gnu.org:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It makes the reader mode unnecessary - as opposed to the old version that wasn't split into columns so reading was slower:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070311064322/https://www.gnu.or...
- https://www.webpagetest.org/ (322kB)
- https://gutenberg.org/ (298kB)
- https://archive.org/ (441kB) [chained JS modules means it's still slow however]
Any others?
As a news site Rest of World is fast loading but because of lead image it can exceed 500KB in size depending on article.
Thank you for the wonderful service & documentation. I wasn’t looking forward to setting up monitoring but your service actually made it a pleasure!
You want that, but most sites where people just read are big in many MBs. They are slow. That's the point, not sites doing stuff.
It's MS Paint from Windows XP, ~700 KB in size in a single HTML file. Source code available here: https://github.com/assemblylanguage/xp-paint
Also glad you like humble, it's one of those side projects I get a lot of enjoyment out of developing and that I can get pretty creative with. You can do some interesting optimizations and modifications when the entire state of a web page is known in advance, and it's fun to look at some of these edge cases.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
You can even get hosting for your Gemini site there.
Some sites are actually going exclusively Gemini, or partially exclusive to Gemini. Proxies to Gemini exist too.