In addition to the multilingual abilities of Maneno, one of the big things we talk about is the low bandwidth aspects to the site and the fact you can set varying levels of bandwidth throttling. To date, this function required that you join the site in order to use it as it is part of a member's profile. While we still recommend that people join to take advantage of various site features, we've now opened up bandwidth selection to anyone who visits the site to try out or use while reading the site. From the home page or any other top level page, you will now see on the right, a Connection Speed selector. Feel free to play around with it and see what we've done with the site to make it as light as possible depending on your needs.
If you try out each setting and analyze it with something like the Page Speed analyzer from Google, you will get results similar to these:
As you can see, the number of elements on a page (the left column) decreases with the actual size of the page (the right column). The last two settings of 'Slow' and 'Very Slow' might not seem all that different, but these settings make a very big difference when you are a member and access other areas of the site. But note that at the lowest setting our home page is a mere 9.4kb to download!
In the center column of this chart you will see that we are big fans of compressing the site to make it even smaller before you view it. This helps us to make the site anywhere from 50% to 70% smaller to download.
You will also notice that we've changed the home page a little bit. We've worked to make elements of more importance have a greater visual impact. We also worked to get more data on the page, while giving it a visual appearance that is lighter overall.
In addition to this, all language selectors have been moved up to the top of the screen for all top level, blog, and hosted blog pages. It clears up a bit of space, gives you the full name of each language in an easier format to select from, and most importantly, it gives us more space to add more language as we get them available.
We hope you like all the changes!
I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one of the main goals of Maneno is to have a lightweight download footprint. We been making good strides in keeping the site small to download, yet fully functional. Of course, this might not be enough for some folks who are having to make do with extremely narrow internet connections and high latency. It would seem to be a simple thing to just get rid of all the images on the site or take away functionality to make it lighter to download. But, not everyone has the same needs when it comes to a light bandwidth site.
Because of this, we have introduced a connection speed selector. You can choose your speed when you join or modify it through your profile page. This a very new feature and it will evolve over time to best fit peoples' needs, but currently there are four settings:
1 Fast (>256kb) - All of the site functions are available.
2 A Little Slow (128kb-256kb) - This blocks a couple of minor scripts and some other items. There are no visible changes, but the download size is a bit less.
3 Slow (56kb-128kb) - This takes out a great deal more in addition to #2. You won't see the individual blog themes. Images on the home page are taken out. Site graphics are removed. Articles will only have a small, thumbnail image. The WSIWYG editor for writing articles is removed as well.
4 Very Slow (<56kb) - This is quite extreme. In addition to everything from #2 and #3, you won't see any article images (unless a user embedded them in the text). In time, more components will be reduced to have Maneno still be functional, but be quite plain and work almost completely as text-only with a target page size of around 5kb.
All of these settings are available now, although #4 isn't complete yet. Play around with them and see what you think. Like I said, we're still working on it and will be refining it, but soon, it will hopefully allow access from even the smallest trickle to this platform of an internet connection. As always, send us a line through the Contact page if you have any feedback.
One of the main pillars of Maneno is to have a small download footprint due to the fact that the target group of users will either be on a) slow land connections of b) slow mobile connections. Obviously, both of these points will change over time (with point b being the most likely one to improve, which is why a mobile version of Maneno is in the works), but for now, we've got to work with what we've got.
While always designing the site with this factor in mind, we've just leveraged a bit of the inherent technologies available in code to make the site even smaller. What we're doing is compressing the site. This takes all of the text that's coming to your browser and mashes it down in to a machine-readable format which is then unmashed when you open up the page.
The net result of this is that all the pages are at least half the size that they were previously. The home page is quite below 50kb as well as the main page in the admin where you write your articles. While this should provide even faster access to the site, it has two potential downfalls. One is that there may be browser incompatibility issues. While we've tested this thoroughly on everything that we can think of, there is still the off chance that someone out there could have problems. Obviously, we'd love to know if that's the case. The second issue is that this taxes the server more. Because there is the "mashing" work to do, every page on the site takes just that much more horsepower to create. This just means that we'll have to monitor the site and see what comes about and adjust things as they happen. All part of the whole Beta process.
While various countries run with the belief that everyone is on a broadband connection, we at Maneno are very aware that this is not the case for the world at large and we do what we can to make the site lightweight. Dialup is still very present in the world today and many people are lucky to have even that. I'm not talking about just developing nations here either. There are a great many people in the "developed" West who have to use dialup as thy live too far from a major town to be able to access a faster type of connection.
Because of this, a lot of people are stuck using the original web browser that came with their machine and for many, this means Internet Explorer 6 or even 5.5. These two browsers are incredible broken and unsafe, yet make up anywhere from 30-40% of the browsers that people use to access the internet. It is hard for people on slower connections to upgrade due to painfully long download times. But at some point, folks should really try to upgrade to a more modern browser to protect themselves from all the nasty things on the web. My obvious choice for upgrade is Firefox. There are others as well out there, but this one has proven time and again to be a solid browser that people can rely on to be safe and stable.
With the release of Firefox 3, the browser has gotten even more secure, but at a price of speed. This isn't really noticeable for those on a broadband connection, but for those on dialup, it can be painful. The following suggestions are not recommended, but might be necessary if you've managed to download Firefox 3, but find your non-broadband connection to be even more slow:
Click on Tools > Options.
Click on the Security icon in the window that pops up.
Uncheck the boxes next to 'Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected attack site' and 'Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery'.
Then click on the Advanced icon in that window.
In the tabs you'll see under that click on 'Update'.
Uncheck the boxes next to 'Firefox', 'Installed Add-ons', 'Search Engines'.
Click OK and that should be it.
This will disable a lot of very good security and update systems, but again, it might be necessary. Even still, with all of this disabled, you're much better off using Firefox 3 than Explorer 6 or older.
On an email note, GMail can be very, very slow on dialup. A shortcut around this is to use their mobile version. It's ugly and basic, but if you go to m.gmail.com, you'll undoubtedly find that it moves a lot faster than the full version. It's designed for what used to be the rather limited speed of mobile phone data connections. With even those speeding up these days, we can only keep our fingers crossed that Google won't mess with this handy backdoor.
