Web and Free Software
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Web
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Alex Cabal ☛ How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web
In 2021 the Standard Ebooks server served about 1.4 million ebook downloads over 15.5 million page views. That comes out to a little over 1.2 million page views per month, and that excludes requests for our OPDS and RSS feeds, which also number in the millions per month. It’s been on the front page of Hacker News at least three times in the past several years without breaking a sweat. And we did all this with a tiny VPS serving a website that has no Javascript—or even a database!
The amount of traffic we get isn’t that crazy. But it’s a demonstration of how inexpensive, classic-web technology can serve a surprising amount of traffic, without relying on any of the technological crutches that so many of us reflexively reach for nowadays when starting new projects.
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University of Toronto ☛ We outsource our public web presence and that's fine
I work for a pretty large Computer Science department, one where we have the expertise and need to do a bunch of internal development and in general we maintain plenty of things, including websites. Thus, it may surprise some people to learn that the department's public-focused web site is currently hosted externally on a SaaS provider. Even the previous generation of our outside-facing web presence was hosted and managed outside of the department. To some, this might seem like the wrong decision for a department of Computer Science (of all people) to make; surely we're capable of operating our own web presence and thus should as a matter of principle (and independence).
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Standards/Consortia
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Terence Eden ☛ Internationalise The Fediverse
We live in the future now. It is OK to use Unicode everywhere.
It seems bizarre to me that modern Internet services sometimes "forget" that there's a world outside the Anglosphere. Some people have the temerity to speak foreign languages! And some of those languages have accents on their letters!! Even worse, some don't use English letters at all!!!
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Linux Foundation
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Silicon Angle ☛ Major tech players work with 'Linux' Foundation to improve the mapping universe
Map apps are both a blessing and a curse. They can be enormously helpful in locating the fastest route around traffic snarls or the closest ice cream shop. Yet they can also be an irritation when erroneously listing businesses as closed or mistaking a private home for a boat ramp.
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