LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline ☼
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Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.
The Service Relief Project
Use these instructions to get up and running with helping your community!
Kick off your city's relief efforts as we all learn to cope with COVID-19 with this starter powered by Gatsby, Airtable, and community efforts.
This project is aims to make it as easy as possible to launch and manage an index of resources in your city during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Max Böck: Emergency Website Kit
In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But existing (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic.
Like so many others, I’m currently in voluntary quarantine at home - and I used some time this weekend to put a small boilerplate together for this exact usecase.
Here’s the main idea:
• generate a static site with Eleventy
• minimal markup, inlined CSS
• aim to transmit everything in the first connection roundtrip (~14KB)
• progressively enable offline-support w/ Service Worker
• set up Netlify CMS for easy content editing
• one-click deployment via Netlify
The site contains only the bare minimum - no webfonts, no tracking, no unnecessary images. The entire thing should fit in a single HTTP request. It’s basically just a small, ultra-lean blog focused on maximum resilience and accessibility. The Service Worker takes it a step further from there so if you’ve visited the site once, the information is still accessible even if you lose network coverage.
The end result is just a set of static files that can be easily hosted on cloud infrastructure and put on a CDN. Netlify does this out of the box, but other providers or privately owned servers are possible as well.
Travis Almand: A Guide to Console Commands (CSS Tricks)
This guide covers what’s available in the console object of Firefox and Chrome as they are often the most popular browsers for development and they do have a few differences in various aspects of the console. The new Chromium-based Edge is essentially the same as Chrome in many ways so, in most cases, the console commands will operate much the same.
GoAccess
A free, open-source analytics tool. Use this instead of Google Analytics.
GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.
It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly.
Commento
A fast, privacy-focused commenting platform.
Commento has not, does not, and will not gather your personal information to sell to advertisers, third-party trackers, or other organisations.
Pay what you want. Regardless of how much you pay for Commento, you'll get access to all the features. It's that simple.
Ends and means
This is about whether it’s okay to create collateral damage by deliberately denying people access to web features in order to further a completely separate agenda.
This isn’t about you or me. This is about all those people who could potentially become makers of the web. We should be welcoming them, not creating barriers for them to overcome.
