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What are your favourite lightweight websites?
I'm a huge fan of lightweight sites. They load super fast on mobile and that's the most important thing for me. I found a number of outdated lists online and wanted to hear what your favourites are.
Here is my list.
News
https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org/
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news/canada/toronto?sort=editors-picks
http://68k.news/
https://legiblenews.com/
https://www.skinnyguardian.xyz/
https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/
http://skimfeed.com/
https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/text/textedition
Edit
- Lots to think about, thank you everyone!
I'm not entirely sure if it counts, but Frogfind is a really cool search engine that turns most pages into plain text.
I've been looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing!
No problem! I use it a lot on my old macs.
I just shared this elsewhere but I love huge single page manuals that take one second to load and I can keep open and Ctrl+f lots of times and find everything I want without having to load anything else, ever.
The are many examples in old-school Open Source, the one I used was the Emacs manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/emacs.html
I wish more projects did that, not just old ones.
Wow that is fantastic. I've never seen so much documentation for a project!
A lot of the GNU stack is just incredibly well-documented. It is kinda born out of neccessity with old CLI tools, where net access wasn't a given.
Man pages are what make CLI tools easier to learn than GUI tools.
I mean, Emacs can’t be far away from being an OS by itself with all the functionality and customization packed in, so if all that is documented it has to be massive.
Right, but I've seen actual documentation for actual OSes and it hasn't been this detailed! Awesome work.
https://plaintextsports.com/ is my favorite website for keeping up with multiple games at once. Scoreboards and play by play for every major game in American sports, all in plain text; no fancy scoreboards or ads or highlight reels. Easy to follow, loads instantly, information is up-to-date.
Do they cover college sports?
I'm not sure about all sports but I've used them to keep up with NCAA basketball during March, so there's definitely some availability
I like https://text.npr.org for news.
Here’s another alternative: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
It’s nice because the “most significant” articles are prefaced with a chatgpt summary.
Metafilter is a bastion of the older internet and is extremely lightweight, especially with the classic theme applied (button in the footer)
wiby.me is a nice search engine for old school plain HTML websites which tend to be quite lightweight. The "surprise me" button is especially fun, since you come across oddball niche sites (which feels kinda like using stumbleupon again).
Granted, this McMaster-Carr hardware site isn’t something I use everyday, but I still visit every so often just to marvel at the engineering behind the quick page loads for an e-commerce site. Simply mind blowing.
McMaster is every mechanical engineer's favorite website. It's so easy to find almost anything you need very quickly, orders get delivered the very next day, and most of the hardware has part drawings and a button to download a CAD model right there when you click on the product. Perfection.
Agreed- the site is great and their shipping is incredibly fast. Even as just an everyday consumer, I find useful items on there from time to time.
The backend is powered by Ruby on Rails, if you can beleive it.
Wow, that's fast! Funny to see them in this thread because we use them at my work, but I just pay the bills. It's production actually browsing the site and making purchases, so I've never actually gone to their site.
As much as I would like to not have my first post on tildes linking me in some way to Luke Smith I feel credit has to be given to his attempt to make a non bloated site for recipes based.cooking. The site is lovely and light and I feel it performs its function very well.
LFTL: https://based.cooking/
There is a person out there who likes to collect license plates. He made a website showing what license plates looked like from the past until now for the US, Mexico, and Canada. The website is constantly updated with new content so you reasonably know what plates literally look like today. His website appears to have been unchanged technologically (from a 1998 sort of perspective) so it should load on pretty much anything (and it appears that it is only served as un-encrypted HTTP as well.
http://15q.net/
Did we just… ~ it to death?
https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/ :: Maintains a pretty good list: News, Tech, front-end alternatives to popular sites... Also keeps it up to date with new entries submitted via the comments section.
This is a great compilation, thanks for sharing! I found a few new sites and lost a few hours :-)
https://wttr.in/
This kinda counts. It's meant to be a weather service you can use from a terminal, but it renders in your browser too.
This one is really cool! Thanks for sharing. I appreciate the documentation and customization. One of the more readable weather tools I've used. I'm sure I'll find a place to use it.
It looks super cool but web interface shows completely different data (the right one) than when invoked in PowerShell (completely wrong one).
Of course, https://tildes.net/
Fabien Sanglard's blog is nicely lightweight, he even has a post describing his ethos behind the design.
Spent some time reading through the latest post on his families video game collection. This is a great blog thanks for sharing!
https://skimfeed.com/ when I simply want to scan the articles's title for something to read.
https://www.tennis-x.com/ I saw someone on reddit linking this site and I loved the layout. Another person also told me that those type os sites follow a "philosophy" specific to a type of web-design layout. It's called brutalist web design (https://brutalist-web.design/). I think that this type of design appeals to people that, like me, like lightweight websites. But maybe this type of design are inviable to todays standards since most site need space and loading time for ads, so that's why there is not a lot of them today. In the past that were more of those type of layouts maybe because there wasn't the practice to put ads on websites.
the three sites apparently all are, for those who want to know what this is about
https://news.ycombinator.com/
"Hacker News"
It's mostly tech stuff like you'd get at slashdot, maybe a hair nerdier, and very lightweight.
http://xkcd.com/
The humour is hit and miss - but the hits can be out of the ballpark, and the misses only waste a few seconds of your day (unless you go to http://explainxkcd.com to try and understand it).
Very minimal and only unobtrusive advertising (of the authors own works).
If you didn't know about XKCD before then you're one of today's lucky 10,000!