When away from home, i often use Airtel GPRS to access the internet. The speeds offered by Airtel GPRS are very low and it is real pain to open some heavy websites.

I have found many ways to get my work done even on slow internet connection, here are the tips to manage with slow internet connection.

Browsing:

1. Use Skweezer:

Skweezer is a service that compresses and reformats Web content being downloaded to a device, so that it loads faster, looks better.

Just point out your web browser to http://www.skweezer.net and then type the URL you want to Skweeze and hit enter.

You can also create bookmark in firefox to automatically skweeze web pages by typing skweeze http://www.your-url-here.com

Just create a new Bookmark in firefox with following info.

2. Google Transcoder:

Google Transcoder was built as a search engine for cell phones, but it also can help reduce the complexity and visual clutter on Web pages. You can use Google transcoder to simplify webpages to make them load faster.

Visit http://www.google.com/m

3. Opera Mini Simulator:

Opera Mini recently launched Opera Mini 3, they have put online Opera Mini Simulator to demonstrate the functionality of Opera Mini and for web developers, to make sure their sites work well with the tiny browser.

This is a java applet that works like Opera Mini, you can use the Opera Mini simulator to surf websites faster.

Grabbing Feeds:

When using low speed internet connection, I use mobile version of Bloglines.

The mobile version of bloglines available at http://www.bloglines.com/mobile loads faster and automatically opens all links through skweezer web service.

Blog Publishing:

To publish posts to my blog, i use BlogDesk Software or Performancing Firefox Extension, so i don’t have to login to blog admin panel everytime i want to make a post.

Yahoo Messenger:

I use a simplified version of Yahoo Messenger called Yahelite, YahELite is a full featured Yahoo chat client written in ‘C’. It loads quickly, runs fast and is considerate of computers resources.

You can download YahELite from http://www.yahelite.org

or try the hack to remove ads from yahoo messenger, it will drastically improve the speed of Yahoo Messenger.

Gmail & Orkut Login Problems:

Gmail & Orkut often give problems on low speed connections. Login to Gmail take ages if you are using low speed connection.

Orkut also gives errors and Login Box doesn’t appear sometimes.

For Gmail, If you are using Gmail in standard mode, You can try opening Gmail in standard html mode by using the URL http://mail.google.com/mail/h/

Also you can try http://m.gmail.com to open Gmail Mobile Version.

For Orkut, you can Bookmark this link. It will skip Orkut front page and open additional login page which loads faster than Orkut homepage.

Tips for Webmasters:

Uploading Files to webserver:

If you are on a slow internet connection, it is very hard to upload many files to your webserver via FTP.

1. Many webhosts provide the facility to upload zip files through web interface and they automatically decompress the zip file to the server after the upload is complete.

2. Another approach is by using wget command, first connect to webserver using telnet and use the wget command to transload file from any website to your web server.

For example: if you want to transload wordpress package to your web server. The command will be:

[server]$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

You can then unpack the tar, zip files by passing untar ,unzip commands through telnet.

This technique can also be used when you want to download a huge file on slow internet connections but the source website doesn’t have resume functionality. Just transload the file to your webserver and download it from there.

That’s it. If you know any more tips to make life easier for slow internet connection users, please feel free to leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: slow internet, connection, tips, tricks, gprs, dial up

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