Help my website is too small

136 points by carlana

rau

I think that the satire tag is incorrect and that this is a true post, right?

As for the issue itself, if true it’s close to enraging that someone would expect that a page has to be thousands of bytes to be real.

weberc2

Probably this bit

So please can Django get it sorted and add some bloat to their home page, and to their framework, and can someone also send me tips on bloating my own sites, so that my profile links can be counted as real websites? Thanks!
- nil
  
  That just reads like sarcasm to me.
kevinc

The tag description reads "Satire, parody, and other humor." Close enough.
- chrismorgan
  
  This is only humour in the “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry” sense.
- bdesham
  
  Not to drag us into a meta discussion, but it sounds like maybe the tag needs to be renamed to “humor.” There’s a big difference between saying “this article is humor” and “this article is satire”—arguably all satire is humor, but the converse is definitely not true. And I don’t think most people are familiar with the official definitions of all of our tags.
  - hoistbypetard
    
    When you choose a tag, you have to click on the official definition as you select it. Obviously, there's room for improvement, but the words are right there when you choose it.
    
    bdesham
    
    That’s true if you’re submitting an article, but if you’re just reading, all you see is e.g. “satire.” I just learned that you can hover your cursor over a tag to see its definition in a tooltip, but why would it occur to someone to do that? The tag name seems perfectly self-explanatory.
  - dgl
    
    I'm reminded of IE's size limit of 512 bytes to actually render a 404 page: https://blog.codinghorror.com/creating-user-friendly-404-pages/
    
    hoistbypetard
    
    It was all error pages, not just 404. I remember learning about that one during crunch time as we were trying to get a server module shipped. Our module did some things to make client TLS certificates more usable, and produced error pages that directed users to some self-help. The team mostly used Firefox, and while that was true of about 90% of the target user base as well, one or two really important offices used IE near-exclusively.
    
    We had to re-generate our installer for our plugin very late in the cycle in order to fix that, because that was a real blind spot in our testing. So much of our testing was manual (TBH, some of it was a product of the time, and some of it is not stuff I’d know how to automate today, since it involved someone sitting at a machine with a smart card reader, swapping cards, removing cards, etc.) that we were up very late after generating that fix to make sure it all was good to go.
  - adam_d_ruppe
    
    You just need to add some html comments to pad it up... or tell those other sites to go away and be quiet about you lol. But if you had to silence their spam, a big repeating content html comment would compress well in transit and just be one dom node so it'd minimize the cost of the silliness.
    
    edit: maybe check the offending user-agent too
  - bsandro
    
    After reading the article I realized I don't have gzip enabled on my website; I wonder if that 'site I belong to' will send me the same notification now after I did the thing too ('1.5kb transferred' on main page).
    
    There is a project called 10kb.club that catalogues websites of sizes of that magnitude (not mentioning 250kb/512kb clubs because those are humongous in comparison with 3-6kb mentioned in the article).
    
    k749gtnc9l3w
    
    I think a homepage with the person's photo and short bio can even be plausibly «not real» for those jokers because of response body (i.e. HTML) being too short, but too large for 10kb club because mandatory resources (i.e. the photo) count.
  - olegkovalov
    
    got a notification from a site I belong to
    
    I don't get it. What author is being referring to?
    
    mxuribe
    
    I assume they referring to a website that they are a member of, as in, have a login for...and maybe I will extend my assumption that it's a site that allows for user profile... for example LinkedIn or Discord, etc...
    
    spookylukey
    
    Author here: yes, It's a site that allows you to have a profile with links. I didn't name them because I didn't want to either mock them or particularly promote them.
    
    moltonel
    
    Did you contact them and ask to fix their heuristic ?
    
    spookylukey
    
    I replied to say the links weren't broken. When going through customer support, I don't have high hopes of communicating technical info!
    
    linhns
    
    When going through customer support, I don't have high hopes of communicating technical info!
    
    Then probably that site is not worth using, at least they should be able to handle basic terms, or redirect you to those more capable.
    
    squarism
    
    I also don't get it. And then "apparently if your website is too small". Ok, neat post but what is the source of this?
    
    olegkovalov
    
    Exactly!
    
    Student
    
    You’ll want to detect it’s a crawler and stream /dev/random at the end of the response