But somehow the author has to monetise the content, because the huge amount of bandwidth required to blurb out 1.6 MB on every access is not cheap. So he has to include some advertisements and then also content-like pictures, because people don’t like advertisements being the only pictures on a website.
This is something I see on The Guardian and it infuriates me no end. I end up randomly clicking on articles, even adverts (deliberate maybe?) accidentally as they load and shove what I wanted to click down the page...
Yes, The Guardian is particularly annoying in this regard. Such a shame because, compared to other newspaper sites, they do an awful lot of things very well indeed. It's particularly a problem with Appple devices which impose a horrible lag between input and action, and causes no end of problems - what the hell is up with that?!
Anyone have a count of how big a "complete" page of this article itself - all 748 characters of it - is? I make 64kb for the html alone, but apples-to-apples means we should compare the rest of the assets too.
On this blog there are 11 "share this" buttons, a huge pointless banner of mostly black space, and half a page worthwhile of text is followed by 5 pages of black space to allow for all the sidebar links. Is he being ironic?
I manage a few decently sized blogs for authors and bloggers. From all the checking I've done for these buttons, only Email To A Friend, Facebook, Twitter, and G+ are worth doing.
The others might get 1-10 clicks vs the aforementioned few getting thousands of clicks (or hundreds for G+).
I've gone to just putting Facebook/Twitter/G+/Email, as minimally as possible.
Using Ghostery here... my initial perception of a site is always based partially on how many entries are blocked on load. I've seen pages with 20+ calls to outside sharing services; at that point, a little extra cynicism kicks in.
Depends on the crowd. I wrote a blog post called Hackers and Engineers (the target audience is obviously the same people who read Hackers and Painters) [0]. From what I can see, lots of entries, lots of clicks on the links of the blog post, none on the share/tweet/facebook/g+ buttons.
By contrast, I see people clicking on the tweet/share/facebook button for the blog entry where I compared memes to speaking in metaphor ala Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra [1]. They don't click on the links (except to the book Wisdom Sits in Places)
Different crowds of people react differently to those share buttons, I guess. The HN crowd doesn't really click that much.
Yes people use them. They can drive a decent amount of traffic too if they have some alluring and easily digestible content such as the common "list of top 10 bla bla" articles. It is also suspected that Google weighs shared links highly for ranking so just a few shares can give a substantial boost to a page's seo value. Though no one knows for sure how it works.
I hope he is being ironic. After all, it says THIS page is why the internet sucks. Otherwise, the sense of entitlement is ridiculous. He has a free, hosted blog because it is ad-supported. He must be taking the mickey
He's not taking the mickey - he's actually defending himself saying WP are hosting the ads, not him etc...
There are free blog services with more tactful ad strategy I'm sure. I just find this amusing.
Let me just plug the best ad block software - your brain. Unfocus your mind and zone out the ads and they are simply not there any more (or use adblock - does the job for you).
His whole page is only 256kb total. That's nothing (and very normal) compared to many sites that are 1mb of code and various style sheets over riding each other.
WordPress.com has a lot of really bad themes. With my own blog (hosted on the same network), I gave up looking and went with a simple responsive theme with decent typography.
But yes, right now they're really great for usability. Including disabled people; I travel together with a completely blind person together in the bus every day. He uses a computer with a screen reader at his job and at home. Mobile websites are by far the greatest to use. On a sidenote, HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here.
To some extent they try, but it's rather hard. As is Javascript, though JS is slightly better than Flash. I think JS will eventually become much better than Flash, but not very soon.
I've seen some of the new proposed ad-format for applications, they are a lot more intrusive than the one you will find on a webpage.
And that is for a simple reason. On a webpage you can put more ads per page than on mobile.
Say that on your webpage you have 15 different banners on every impression. That's 15 advertisers, with 15 different costs from the local Grocery Store to Coca Cola.
Now on your app you have 1 or 2 banner. The cost of producing the content is the same, but you have 15 times less advertisers, you have to make the ads cost alot more. And to justify that they will be very very intrusive, so much that old web popups seem nice in comparison.
> If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text.
Yeah, I was wondering about this. Is he advocating turning the entire web into a text file? How does that even work with content rich websites like twitter or facebook or JS-necessary sites like your favorite music/video streaming site? Yes, encoding text with other technologies to increase the user's experience is going to make your file size bigger, but who cares?
It works poorly. The author makes the mistake in saying that everything that is not text is unnecessary and/or advertisement. There's a lot of cruft on most Web pages, but there's also a lot of valuable non-text info.
My browser is looking like windows did during XP. Back then, I had a anti virus, a couple of anti-adware, one anti hacking and a firewall installed. After XP, most of that got built in while the momentum of adwares and viruses/worms went down, and today I only got a anti-virus, and even that one is not even doing much (no warnings for the last few years).
My browser however got adblock + extension, noscript, ghostery, https-everywhere, cookie handler, and I have also dabbled with privoxy. One can also add tor to the list.
So I guess, the question will be if the browser manufacturers will do the same as microsoft did and start having a bunch of that built in. Debian-live CD has already started with having adblock pre-installed.
If you wind up using Privoxy, it can take the place of all the other add-ons you mentioned, except https-everywhere. And it works transparently for all browsers.
It's not the "page" that's the problem, it's the CMS. The linked-to article by the OP may only be 400 bytes, but that website (presumably) template is meant to scale for content of 40-400,000 bytes. Would it be nice if there was a way to scale down extraneous files dependent on the actual content size...sure...but then you'd have developers and designers complaining about all the movable parts in the CMS (i.e. you'd basically be designing a site for different article sizes...for each of the different browsers you already design for...so multiply your template work by at least 2).
This is why whenever I open an article or blog post, the first thing I do before even trying to read the article is click the "readability" button (or pocket/instapaper/safari reader/whichever one you like). I appreciate what the person above said "take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text." That's fine. But unless I'm on my tumblr dashboard, I'm visiting a blog probably to read text.
Branding is important, sure. But you can have great branding and still be readable. You don't need huge style sheets, you don't need a ton of images, you don't need a ton of scripts. Look at Svbtle for example, right? So what's the problem?
"Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet."[1]
So what's the solution? First of all I love that _most_ of the personal blogs on HN lead by example. Secondly I think adblock and noscript should be encouraged whenever possible (I know there's no way adblock would be rolled in to browsers). Thirdly get native "reader" button in Chrome, FF and IE. Content creators need to make money but until we figure that out, we can't expect users to stare at disgusting web sites for much longer. Or maybe we can, if the state of TV and FM radio advertising teaches us anything... Maybe that's it, most people just deal with it so who cares. Still makes me sad though.
I googled for a list of "top blogs" and found this list[2], amazing how many of them are visually DISGUSTING.
The real problem with that page is that as far as I can tell, the entire article is a lie. Some googling on "Barry Clams" only comes up with the daily mash as sources, and the daily mash doesn't list any sources.
edit:
No relevant results for
"barry clams" -thedailymash
barry clams -thedailymash
bond clams -thedailymash
fleming clams -thedailymash
The 'about' page states "The Daily Mash is a satirical website which publishes spoof articles – i.e. it is all made-up and is not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual"
Current headlines on the homepage include...
"Miliband [UK Labour party leader] not even good at masturbating"
"Beliebers wondering if Nazi persecution would change their taste in pop stars"
I believe, one can replace "security" with "correctness", "compactness", "simplicity", "low signal-to-noise ratio", "openness", "freedom" or many other terms, and the statement will still remain true.
Wait a minute, your page saves to 1.28MB, and you only have 133 words in your article. This gives you 10kb of download per word. The article you’re pointing to is only 4kb per word.
Apparently the joke is lost on HN readers, The Daily Mash is a parody site, it parodies news sites (specifically tabliod ones in UK, its kind of like The Onion). You would not expect a clear form from them - In fact, whether intentional or not, the overbloat would actually be a parody itself, and of the very thing bitched about in the article.
He forgot the most important reason why "the internet" sucks, even though the page he's complaining about flaunts a prominent example: stealing content. Check out the unsourced photograph of the two actors. Actually, a second look at all the fluff on the page shows that much of it is itself poking fun at typical bloated websites with cheesy advertising, so this turns out to be a complicated example.
This has been my point for years, and it has only gotten worse. Right now I'm thinking of writing an addon that simply blocks all third-party content (not just cookies), removes any divs that have a className or ID containing "share", removes comments after the first 100 (5000 comments and no pagination is not exceptional), etc. Perhaps just ignore output after FirstH1TagOnPage.ParentNode.Endtag.PositionInDataStream.
I think my site does alright, sameless plug: https://lucb1e.com/. Note that it's hosted on low-end hardware; if you want to view loading times, append ?debug to the URL. Or should I even get rid of the share buttons on articles here? I don't think they're used much anyway.
A small (offtopic) comment on your blog entry about IPv6... /64 is not twice the IPv4 address space - it's twice the number of bits. This translates 2^32 times bigger than entire address space.
Only without parsing all pages through a (rather slow) third party service, but yes parsing all outgoing HN links through Readability by default was another idea that never made it.
107 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadThat gives him a ratio of ~1/1000 as opposed to the article he's complaining about's ~1/4000
Or "This Page..." is actually a self reference ?
I'd recommend getting inspiration from other blogs, https://svbtle.com/ for instance.
The others might get 1-10 clicks vs the aforementioned few getting thousands of clicks (or hundreds for G+).
I've gone to just putting Facebook/Twitter/G+/Email, as minimally as possible.
(adblock)
By contrast, I see people clicking on the tweet/share/facebook button for the blog entry where I compared memes to speaking in metaphor ala Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra [1]. They don't click on the links (except to the book Wisdom Sits in Places)
Different crowds of people react differently to those share buttons, I guess. The HN crowd doesn't really click that much.
[0]http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/04/11/hackers-and-engineers/
[1]http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/02/22/darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagr...
Frequent post's to logger.base79.com who (once I figured out how to navigate their site) appear to be some shady rights management company.
The post request also contains the following
{"uuidSession":"xxxx","uuidPermanent":"xxx","ip":"83.xxx.xxx.234","partner":"dailymash","timeStamp":"Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:17:20 GMT","youtube":{"title":"Favourite One Liner","video_id":"toEqW3wGQSs","volume":0,"duration":141,"currentTime":5,"currentPercent":4}}
Delightful.
But yes, right now they're really great for usability. Including disabled people; I travel together with a completely blind person together in the bus every day. He uses a computer with a screen reader at his job and at home. Mobile websites are by far the greatest to use. On a sidenote, HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here.
Do most screen readers support Flash?
And that is for a simple reason. On a webpage you can put more ads per page than on mobile.
Say that on your webpage you have 15 different banners on every impression. That's 15 advertisers, with 15 different costs from the local Grocery Store to Coca Cola.
Now on your app you have 1 or 2 banner. The cost of producing the content is the same, but you have 15 times less advertisers, you have to make the ads cost alot more. And to justify that they will be very very intrusive, so much that old web popups seem nice in comparison.
Edit: adjusted sizes to correct for errors due to caching.
The entire page, sans Adblock-able advertisements is 900KB-1MB.
Granted, that includes:
The site's scripts - which can ostensibly increase usability
Images - which help tell the story, establish branding and increase usability
Stylesheets - which make a page visually appealing and increase usability.
If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text.
Yeah, I was wondering about this. Is he advocating turning the entire web into a text file? How does that even work with content rich websites like twitter or facebook or JS-necessary sites like your favorite music/video streaming site? Yes, encoding text with other technologies to increase the user's experience is going to make your file size bigger, but who cares?
But then the front page of HN is just 24k, while the front page of the BBC is 112kb, without any of the images.
What's the easiest way of measuring the complete "load" of a page?
Firebugs net panel shows how much data the page pulls down, and how long it took to do it.
My browser however got adblock + extension, noscript, ghostery, https-everywhere, cookie handler, and I have also dabbled with privoxy. One can also add tor to the list.
So I guess, the question will be if the browser manufacturers will do the same as microsoft did and start having a bunch of that built in. Debian-live CD has already started with having adblock pre-installed.
Branding is important, sure. But you can have great branding and still be readable. You don't need huge style sheets, you don't need a ton of images, you don't need a ton of scripts. Look at Svbtle for example, right? So what's the problem?
"Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet."[1]
So what's the solution? First of all I love that _most_ of the personal blogs on HN lead by example. Secondly I think adblock and noscript should be encouraged whenever possible (I know there's no way adblock would be rolled in to browsers). Thirdly get native "reader" button in Chrome, FF and IE. Content creators need to make money but until we figure that out, we can't expect users to stare at disgusting web sites for much longer. Or maybe we can, if the state of TV and FM radio advertising teaches us anything... Maybe that's it, most people just deal with it so who cares. Still makes me sad though.
I googled for a list of "top blogs" and found this list[2], amazing how many of them are visually DISGUSTING.
1: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/with-funding-for-svbtle-dus...
2: http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/
edit: No relevant results for
edit2: oops, apparently the daily mash is satireby the way, jasoncartwright, your reply is "dead"
The 'about' page states "The Daily Mash is a satirical website which publishes spoof articles – i.e. it is all made-up and is not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual"
Current headlines on the homepage include... "Miliband [UK Labour party leader] not even good at masturbating"
"Beliebers wondering if Nazi persecution would change their taste in pop stars"
"Middle class man convinced builders like him"
What next?
- This Monitor Is Why Electricity Sucks. - This Truck Is Why Roads Suck. - This Toilet Is Why Water Sucks. - This Man Is Why Earth Sucks.
Edit: (I'm kidding, not being mean)
I believe, one can replace "security" with "correctness", "compactness", "simplicity", "low signal-to-noise ratio", "openness", "freedom" or many other terms, and the statement will still remain true.
A 400 byte joke is kinda boring without all the pics and ads around it. Still not really funny at all.....
Pot calling kettle?
I think my site does alright, sameless plug: https://lucb1e.com/. Note that it's hosted on low-end hardware; if you want to view loading times, append ?debug to the URL. Or should I even get rid of the share buttons on articles here? I don't think they're used much anyway.