LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments

The printed archives of Low-tech Magazine now amount to four volumes with a total of 2,398 pages and 709 images. All books are printed on demand. 

How Sustainable is a Solar Powered Website?

Our self-hosted, solar-powered, off-grid website has been running for 15 months now. In this article, we present its energy and uptime data, and calculate the embodied energy of our configuration. Based on these results, we consider the optimal balance between sustainability and server uptime, and outline possible improvements.

Low-tech Magazine in Spanish, French, and Other Languages

During the last months we have been working on transforming Low-tech Magazine into a multilingual publication. Many articles had been translated over the years, but they were not easy to find. Now, each language has its own solar powered main page.

The French and Spanish versions are the most complete for now, with respectively 73 and 47 articles online. Dutch, German, Polish, Italian, and Portuguese main pages are also available. Some languages also have articles that are not translated into English.

The Printed Website: Second Volume Out Now

The printed version of Low-tech Magazine can be viewed with no access to a computer or a power supply -- or when the solar powered website is down due to bad weather.

The second volume of the printed website is out now and contains 32 articles originally published between 2007 and 2012. The book, which has 618 pages and 268 images, is for sale in the Lulu Bookstore.

Whereas the first volume contained all but a handful of web articles published between 2012 and 2018, this second volume features a third of the web articles published in the earlier years, carefully selected for their continued relevance and interest today. Overall, we wanted to make an attractive book with timeless articles rather than an exact copy of the website.

Low-tech Magazine: The Printed Website

After 12 years, Low-tech Magazine finally makes the jump from web to paper.

The first result is a 704-page perfect-bound paperback which is printed on demand and contains 36 of the most recent articles from the website (2012 to 2018).

A second volume, collecting articles published between 2007 and 2011, will appear later this year.

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

Low-tech Magazine was born in 2007 and has seen minimal changes ever since. Because a website redesign was long overdue — and because we try to practice what we preach — we decided to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered version of Low-tech Magazine. The new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.

The solar powered server that runs the new website.