Every few years I want to slim down my web properties and internet use. The internet is a globally a large user of electricity, thus a large producer of greenhouse gas emissions. But the bigger pain are overbuilt sites that tax my computers and eat up my mobile phone data. Our “everything online” lives in the pandemic doesn’t work for those without fast internet service, not to mention it’s thrilling to load a site that’s a light as a whisper, even on a phone. And in much of the world, that’s the difference between a site loading or having someone necessarily give up in frustration. Since so many of my sites are dedicated to Universalist Christianity, with the hope of spreading it, that won’t do.
As an interim step, I’m using this lighter theme here, and I shrunk the header image at revscottwells.com. I’ll survey my properties and make them as small as practical.
What inspired this now? The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s recent deployment of a low-bandwidth news site, as a service to dial-up and metered mobile phone users. There are other “lite” news sites, but none as attractive.
Good news from the Free Software Foundation: Boston National Public Radio broadcaster WBUR has begin streaming its content in the free Ogg format. The importance?
Unlike MP3, Windows Media, Real Audio or Quicktime, Ogg Vorbis is not restricted by software patents. The threat of these patent lawsuits chills independent development of multimedia software tools. The use of unencumbered formats like Ogg Vorbis is necessary for providing access to publicly funded news and other programming without dependence on the patent-holding corporations and proprietary software vendors.
Patent-encumbered formats owned by companies like Microsoft and Apple require listeners to use non-free software; controlled by them, not by the users. They design their software to restrict the users and spy on their activities. If users choose Ogg Vorbis for audio and Ogg Theora for video, they can use many different media players, including free software designed to respect their freedom and privacy. (Full press release at FSF)
In short, you shouldn’t have to go through a proprietary gate to get to content supported by the public purse. For more background, I wrote about the Ogg format twice last year here and here.
Good for WBUR. You can listen to the stream (in a number of different formats) here.
I grabbed this domain today. (No content.) Seems unwise for it to be floating available — it could be snapped up by anyone — when it could be very valuable for Unitarian Universalist promotion.
Even more valuable than magazine ads.
Cost: $24 for two years.
Just saying.
Personal and cultural reflections, plus the District of Columbia and some Esperanto