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Review: The littlest web server
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I don't believe I would go so far as to suggest most people interested in hosting their own websites take this approach. It's a bit on the technical side and self-limiting. The Pico is not well suited to high-traffic, serving large files, or offering server-side scripting. The Pico is quite unsuited for hosting a forum, a picture gallery, or streaming home videos. At the same time, I do think this experiment shows what is possible with five pages of Python code and a minimal computing device which costs less than $10 USD.
While using no JavaScript, no cookies, no server-side coding, no CSS, no tracking, and no signed certificates I was able to craft a simple website in about twenty minutes that provides links, a blog-like news feed, and an RSS feed. The site is responsive to different screen sizes and it obeys the browser's light/dark theme. It's simple by modern standards, but when we consider that the pages are mostly less than 3,000 bytes while many modern websites will load twenty times that data just for JavaScript functions, I think simple might be a step in the right direction.
My little Pico server is a demonstration that we can share information on the Web without requiring powerful servers, massive data centres, pop-up ads, login pages, tracking, comment sections full of posts from bots, or browsers that consume over a gigabyte of RAM. This site requires a single sub-$10 part, a few lines of code, and either a USB cable or four rechargeable batteries. (Yes, the Pico can run on battery power for hours, serving pages with no wires attached.) The site displays almost equally well in console-based text browsers as in Firefox. In a world that tends to assume everyone has high speed Internet access, 16GB of RAM, and hex-core processors, maybe we could all use some clean, simple options to remind us that there are more efficient solutions.
Anyone who would like to try a similar experiment can find Raspberry Pi Pico W devices through Raspberry Pi or PiShop. The code I used to construct my little corner of the World Wide Web can be found on Codeberg.