Daniel Tamas

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Author: Daniel Tamas (Page 1 of 2)

Why AMP / Instant Articles is not the way

This blog post has been on my mind for quite a while given my background is in fullstack webdevelopment and a warning: I lack writing skills, so bare with me.

As the Internet grows, more and more challenges arise and more people are underserved by aging web technologies and paradigms need to be shifted in order for everyone in the world to have a fast browsing experience, almost with no regard to connection speeds.

The 2 most prominent initiatives in the past 3 years have been from Google and Facebook, the AMP Project and respectively Facebook Instant Articles. Before I go deeper into the topic, a bit about both of these new tools aimed at making the web faster and well, more instant.

The Google AMP project is more ambitious and has been launched in Oct 2015 according to Wikipedia. It stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and its main purpose is to declutter current day means of webdevelopment and to make all pages load faster by caching the resulting page on Google’s servers ( coming back to this later on ). If you perform a Google search on your device and you click on an AMP enabled link, the page will magically appear inside an iframe, right there on the spot. The benefits are indeed visible, at least at first anyway.

The downside of AMP is that it brings a plethora of new HTML tags and rules that were not necessary ( and I firmly believe they won’t be ) complicating one’s application flow by having to serve AMP valid pages as an extra rel to your normal page, so the Google crawler can reach it.

Facebook’s Instant Articles is similar to what Google’s AMP is trying to achieve but in its own ecosystem ( inside Facebook apps: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram ) and with a smaller footprint in terms of HTML todos. One can get up and running with these new formats once you’ve connected your FB page to Instant Articles, submitted a minimum of 3 properly formatted instant articles for verification and use either an RSS feed to let FB pick them up or via the FB Api.

Now that I’ve covered what these 2 technologies do ( in a very short manner ) let’s dive deeper into what the issues are and using new, lighter and faster frontend web technology, we can make the internet great again.

First, the terminology seems to upset some folks at Google claiming AMP is an open source project that benefits everyone, but only works in Google Chrome and inside Google products like Search. Save it bud.

Next, why use a completely new but unnecessary HTML markup set when the original HTML is perfect as it is for delivering fast loading content?

The internet today is broken mostly because its progress when it comes to big publishers, has stalled. Big publishers given their mammoth like structure have always had issues with adapting to new technologies ( even if some might argue the contrary ). One of the first things I do when visiting any site is to open the source code to have a look at what new techniques I might find when reading the HTML code and to my surprise these findings are very rare.

Facebook’s Instant Articles are no better and lures its victims ( ie: publishers ) into its walled garden with an ever decreasing reach with the promise of a faster experience without actually disclosing you will be at the mercy of the app owner.

AMP differs from Instant Articles since it lets you format the page the way you want it visually whereas FB IA will restrict the styles to templates which do not vary from pub to pub making it harder to distinguish different publishers or to mitigate brand theft.

On the other hand, having spent the last month more on LinkedIn’s app, I noticed most pubs have opted for putting their pages on AMP ( for the sake of organic reach in search I suppose ) renouncing their own brand URLs in favour of Google’s ampproject.com subdomains. Why oh Why?

Even if the garden is bigger, the wall exists. I am going to list below all the things that come to mind why NOT TO USE AMP NOR FB Instant Articles:

  1. It locks you in to specific platforms ( AMP – even if open source, only works in mostly Google products )
  2. Your monetisation suffers given each only allow mostly their own inventories, locking you in
  3. They’re both unnecessary technologies given the current state of webdevelopment – think VueJS
  4. They bloat any application given you have to treat URLs differently depending on who’s crawling or what’s being sent to FB
  5. All pubs lack the beauty and functionality of well written Javascript Apps
  6. More power is transferred to the internet giants of today, leaving you the pub with the illusion of control ( until the day the FB Feed Algo changes or Google releases a new update )
  7. More resources have to be invested towards maintaining and testing these 2 new ( unnecessary ) worlds, with the hope that engagement, retention and monetisation will go up
  8. The instant experience was not invented by the 2 vendors. It exists outside their grasp and oh man, it’s beautiful ( will post more about this in a future post ) – think VueJS ( not React nor Angular )
  9. Both parties will argue that with their proposed tech, your metrics will improve ( including ads ). Please take this with a grain of salt… actually don’t believe a thing until you’ve tested your assumptions in a real live environment
  10. A lot of ad blockers and firewalls block Google content making your hard worked AMP pages hosted on Google’s servers, inaccessible

Now, as you may have noticed in the above list, VueJS tends to show up in a few places and for a good reason. It’s light, small in size and fast in execution. I am biased towards it but you don’t have to be. There are tones of new reactive JS frameworks popping up, each redefining how organisations think about their web presence.

One of the biggest opportunities that lie in the horizon are PWAs or Progressive Web Apps or in short: JS based websites that act like an app. There are many pros on why this is the next evolutionary step one of which is the ease of build and the crossplatform functionality – your PWA will run on any OS inside a browser window: how cool and useful is that?

Chrome has the biggest market share in terms of usage at the moment and low level APIs are being opened to the public so a PWA can communicate with the device it runs on ( talk about native payment on Chrome / Safari, both web and mobile ).

All the above are just scratching the surface on what a PWA can do but, let’s go the simple route: you want your web site to be a fast loading low resource consumption beast, without having to worry to much, right?

Here’s a setup that will surely achieve this:

  1. A basic shell for your website ( without the fancy wording: some initial code to be shown to the user like a header and a loading screen )
  2. Pre-gizipped CSS at the top of your HTML page
  3. VueJS + modules + your app compressed, minified and pre-gizipped at the bottom
  4. All your content served via your API ( html content, bits of info, json etc )

The pre-gizipped part if just a preference of mine to keep the server light when requests for static resources come. No need for on the fly gizipping so the files just get served.

On a recent PWA, the results were amazing and the whole website loads in under a second and leveraging browser caching you achieve even better results. You can even try using P2P CDN solutions and then you have an instant experience which I dare to argue is even faster than what native apps can do.

TL;DR

  1. Google AMP and FB Articles restrict your business
  2. There is no need for additional HTML tags to make your web apps blazing fast
  3. Upgrading your systems to 2018 web tech is your best investment
  4. Publishers control the user experience all the way
  5. VueJS is the right choice for the job + APIs

If you’ve read this far you’re either here to make a valid point against what I wrote which is something I encourage or, despite my low level writing skill, you like what was being argued. Either way, drop me a line at [email protected] and share your thoughts.

Daniel

 

Techsylvania 2016

This year I’ll be speaking at the most interesting tech event in Romania, which by no accident is being held in the tech capital of our country, Cluj-Napoca. Getting on the list was a surprise to which I have to thank Vlad & Oana.

Remember, get your tickets ( not for me, as I’m the least interesting at the conference ) here: techsylvania.co

 

3 simple resolutions every entrepreneur should make (and keep) in 2016

list of resolutions on blackboard with three blank, numbered sticky notes

Welcome to yet another exciting and challenging new year! 🙂 As we all do, I’m sure you’ve already started the year with a few resolutions in mind and are eagerly planning on how to get them done. Newsflash: you probably won’t get half of them accomplished by the end of the year. Don’t worry, it’s not entirely your fault, it’s only human that we tend to set goals for ourselves that are not correctly adjusted to what we really need. So, how about this year we keep it simple? I’ve thought about this a lot and realized that truly good resolutions are similar to setting a certain mind frame. They are not a list of desired achievements per se but what will provide the right context for those achievements. I’ve narrowed them down to three, but feel free to add to the list 🙂

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Useful “resources” for entrepreneurs and startups

As an entrepreneur you are always in uncharted waters. And the sweet days when you didn’t care about legal, financial, HR or administrative issues are long gone. Founding a startup requires you to gain insight into any and every aspects concerning your business. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should master everything related to your business, but should definitely know your bearings and always ask questions, preferably from other highly skilled professionals in these areas. So, what are some useful resources that can help you when you’ve embarked on the entrepreneurial voyage?

Well, first of all, just a word of warning: I’m not going to share with you a long list of websites, tools or apps. You can get a ton of those just a Google search away, and you can easily browse to see which of them suite you and your business. No, I’m going to talk to you about some resources we easily overlook, or don’t even consider them resources per say.

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Some essential advice for startups I picked up from How to Web

How to Web is definitely one of those events you are not allowed to miss since it’s the biggest regional conference dedicated to entrepreneurship and web technology. Not to mention that if you’re a newbie startup-up looking to get your idea known, meet up with investors and mentors or win some serious cash prizes to fund your venture, you should definitely consider applying to the Startup Spotlight competition.

But, beyond that, How to Web is the perfect place to meet with some of the most successful entrepreneurs from around the globe, people that have founded startups and who developed products or services we all know and use. And what’s the even better part? They are there to give you advice, share their success stories, their secrets and what they have learnt from their failures. Needless to say, I spent the two days all eyes and ears. So here are some valuable tidbits about entrepreneurship from key speakers I’d like to share with you.

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