From memory: There were people who said their web connection was too slow, and they wanted to be able to read and post by email. They were blown off, but it seems plausible that we could be losing some good people that way. How hard would it be to make the site accessible by email?
Actually, downloading Less Wrong via email would take longer on a slow connection, since the pages are sent with gzip compression over the web, which makes it a whopping 86% smaller. Put another way, getting it over email would take more than 7 times as long. Of course this may vary some from page to page, but the compression should be pretty consistently excellent when you consider the high redundancy of the HTML for handling comment boxes and so on.
I took a look at Less Wrong from a browsing speed standpoint, and it’s doing pretty damn well. All the static files are cached for 7 days, and if you refresh a page that hasn’t changed and you have it in your browser cache, the server just says “HTTP 302 That page hasn’t changed” instead of sending it all over again. My only quibble is that some of the large JavaScript files, like /static/psrs.js, are not gzipped or minified. But again, they get cached for 7 days, so you only need to download them once a week.
So no, someone who’s got a slow connection should not view LW over email. The web is actually faster.
My assumption was that someone who wanted to read LW by email would be reading smaller chunks—just getting articles one at a time without the comments, not seeing the sidebar pieces unless they were specifically asked for. They’d really want a “recent comments” for specific articles.
Extremely. Need to set up a mail server and some sort of daemon service to reply—and reply with what? The output of lynx -dump on the HTML pages that make up the site?
Not to mention it’s implausible that email would save either time or bandwidth, considering how barebones the site is. If such people exist, they are best off being told they are idiots, to prove their cases about email being more efficient, or working on the codebase to reduce use of JavaScript (which is the principal tech that breaks textual browsers).
From memory: There were people who said their web connection was too slow, and they wanted to be able to read and post by email. They were blown off, but it seems plausible that we could be losing some good people that way. How hard would it be to make the site accessible by email?
Actually, downloading Less Wrong via email would take longer on a slow connection, since the pages are sent with gzip compression over the web, which makes it a whopping 86% smaller. Put another way, getting it over email would take more than 7 times as long. Of course this may vary some from page to page, but the compression should be pretty consistently excellent when you consider the high redundancy of the HTML for handling comment boxes and so on.
I took a look at Less Wrong from a browsing speed standpoint, and it’s doing pretty damn well. All the static files are cached for 7 days, and if you refresh a page that hasn’t changed and you have it in your browser cache, the server just says “HTTP 302 That page hasn’t changed” instead of sending it all over again. My only quibble is that some of the large JavaScript files, like /static/psrs.js, are not gzipped or minified. But again, they get cached for 7 days, so you only need to download them once a week.
So no, someone who’s got a slow connection should not view LW over email. The web is actually faster.
My assumption was that someone who wanted to read LW by email would be reading smaller chunks—just getting articles one at a time without the comments, not seeing the sidebar pieces unless they were specifically asked for. They’d really want a “recent comments” for specific articles.
Why not use RSS, it sounds perfectly designed just for that.
Extremely. Need to set up a mail server and some sort of daemon service to reply—and reply with what? The output of
lynx -dump
on the HTML pages that make up the site?Not to mention it’s implausible that email would save either time or bandwidth, considering how barebones the site is. If such people exist, they are best off being told they are idiots, to prove their cases about email being more efficient, or working on the codebase to reduce use of JavaScript (which is the principal tech that breaks textual browsers).