What is a Low-Tech Website?
This website follows the design principles set out by lowtechmagazine.com.
The goal is to reduce energy consumption and hardware requirements on both the server- and user-side.
More broadly, Thinking Without Machines resists the ‘platformisation’ of the Internet.
Instead, it suggests a return to a low-tech form of individual web publishing, common in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The site uses a modified version of the open-source solar theme developed for Hugo by low-tech magazine. You can download a copy of the updated layout here.
It is written entirely in static HTML, CSS and a few lines of Javascript. All images are dithered to reduce file size. (You can see the total size of the page you are viewing in the bottom left corner of the screen.)
There is no additional server-side processing of PHP, SQL or alike. The site makes no calls to external APIs.
To give a rough idea: when I used to host this website on Substack, loading my article ‘Learning to Play: Computer Games and the Origins of AI’ would make 217 server requests and download 4.61 MB of data, which was then decompressed by the user to 10.43MB.
Loading the same article on this website makes just 10 server requests and downloads 335kB of data. There is no additional decompression step.
At the moment, the site is hosted on webspace supplied by my domain name provider.
My hope in the medium term is to move to hosting the site myself locally.
I will then investigate the use of solar energy to power the server at home, much like low-tech magazine, although without the advantage of being based in Barcelona.