I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used retro components otherwise.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar...
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ (Lots of comments at the bottom about image compression)
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.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...
https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design
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.h...