Google amp feb 24, 2016

http://mediagazer.com/160224/p4#a160224p4

http://mediagazer.com/160223/p28#a160223p28

Publishers are dumb. Publishers create terrible websites. Publishers need Facebook and Google to save them.

A lot of moronic rhetoric will exist about this topic.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-starts-including-amp-content-in-mobile-search-results-1456326159

“The feedback from publishers so far has been very enthusiastic. Everyone is excited to make the Web faster,” said Dave Besbris, Google’s vice president of engineering.

The Web or the web is not slow. Browsers on desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones are not the problem.

Bloated, poorly designed websites are the problem. And publishers create them. These stunningly huge article pages bog down old computers and cause slow downloads.

The solution is to create simpler websites. My test site that's using my new formatting app to create static html pages loads fast and works fine on desktop and phone. http://article.soupmode.com/static

My other sites, such as http://maketoledo.com and http://crochet.soupmode.com/, also load fast because the Nginx web server pulls the homepages and the article pages from Memcached. And if the article page was not cached, then my code is accessed, which pulls the content from the MySQL or CouchDB database, and then the content is cached before or after it's sent to the user. A refresh retrieves the newly cached page. But when I create or update an article, that page is cached. Other stream views, such as page 2 and on and search results, are not cached.

Make the web faster? No. Make your websites leaner. Make your websites reader-friendly instead of reader-hostile.

Popular blogging platform and content management system WordPress is also supporting the initiative, potentially adding AMP versions of content to millions of websites using WordPress software.

Is that because Wordpress sites pull content from a database every time an article page is accessed? Memcached and Redis are simple to implement and use. Does every article page need to contain dynamic elements? The answer is probably 'Yes', especially for all the tracking, advertising, and analytics crap that users must download.

“We want to make it really easy for publishers of all shapes and sizes to publish AMP-formatted pages, from the New York Post all the way down to people running their own personal blogs,” said Paul Maiorana, vice president of platform services at WordPress.com parent company Automattic.

Why not create simple, fast-loading, reader-friendly pages by default?

Under the hood, AMP works by simplifying and streamlining the HTML code that powers Web pages to prioritize speed. Google also “caches” pages, or saves copies of them on its own systems, in order to deliver them quicker when users access them. It’s an open-source initiative, meaning anyone is free to use it.

Again, content producers on their own can create simple HTML pages, and they can cache their own content for faster access, thus creating a reader-friendly experience.

This is bizarre. Great for Google, but it's bizarre that web site owners created this mess.

“This really is the Web ecosystem. That means the publishers get a choice of a wide variety of tech solutions including analytics solutions and ad providers,” Mr. Besbris said.

That's not the web. That's monetization or business.

Google’s AMP initiative is just one of many content delivery options now available to online publishers. Facebook, for example, recently launched its own Instant Articles product, which enables publishers to host content directly with the social network instead of driving users back to their own websites. Part of the sales pitch for Instant Articles was that news stories would load faster on mobile devices.

The difference with AMP pages, however, is that publishers host the content themselves, with Google saving or “caching” AMP pages temporarily to speed up their loading times.

Because of this distinction, some publishers say they are less leery of Google’s approach.

“I think of it as very different arrangement to Facebook Instant Articles. We feel much more in control of the content because of the fact this is hosted on our servers and our business model travels with it,” said Kate Harris, a mobile product director at the New York Times.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/02/diving-all-in-or-dipping-a-toe-how-publishers-are-approaching-googles-accelerated-mobile-pages-initiative/