green computing

 Green Computing  is practice of using computers and their resources in environmentally responsible way. Community members may try to use renewable energy, recycled computers, owning rather than streaming media, and creating websites with smaller page loads.

Reduce website energy usage
Article(s) providing incremental tips for improving your website energy efficiency (and thus reducing its carbon footprint)
 * 2022-02-03 Smashing Magazine: Reducing The Web’s Carbon Footprint: Optimizing Social Media Embeds / While the spotlight is on reducing the environmental impact, many of these tips will be great for performance too.
 * 2018-09-24 How to Build a Low-tech Website? / Our new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.
 * 2018-08-08 How to build a Low-Tech website: Software & Hardware / A behind-the-scenes guide on how Low Tech Magazine created their low-tech back-end infrastructure
 * 2019-10-23 17 ways to make your website more energy efficient
 * Pretty good overall. Their AMP recommendation seems wrong however, numerous webdevs have confirmed proper HTML+CSS with minimal/no JS is more efficient than the AMP equivalent. - Tantek Çelik 13:58, 27 May 2020 (PDT)


 * 2019-03-11 Digital guide to low tech A deep-dive into how to create a low-tech website.
 * "Therefore the whole site and server services has been thought over and the average page size has been reduced to 450,56kb (Low tech, High future)."

Purchase when you need to
Only purchase a new computing device when you need to. Purchasing a new computer every year will let you stay up to date on the latest specifications but it will also produce a carbon footprint.

It's better to keep a device until that device is no longer usable.

IndieWeb Examples

 * User:Tomasparks.name
 * I'm in a catch-22, I could build the low-tech website server, but my isp needs me to have a business plan to host anything on my connection and I would still need a CDN.
 * I have a group of projects in the pipeline that will create large amounts of data, that need to be processed and the pay-as-you-go for cloud computing resources sound very attractive. Cloud computing is looking less and less value for money and running my own homelab is looking more attractive. - tomasparks
 * Uses a Call to Action on his website to encourage the consumption of less meat.
 * "The ecosystems of the world are dying. Reduce your :pig::chicken: meat and :cow::goat: dairy intake to help the environment :seedling:"
 * only uses second hand computer parts and posts equipment needs from her website.
 * website reports 98% cleaner than other sites on the web using just 0.01g of carbon according to websitecarbon
 * practices meat free days
 * Works on low-power SBC devices, some second hand devices, and tries to limit paper usage
 * Website was designed to use as few resources as possible. I compress images before they are uploaded and I use images sparingly on the site. I have spent extensive time removing redundant styles on the style sheet. At one point, my site had no favicon to reduce the number of requests that had to be made for my site to load.
 * Features a "Reduce, reuse, recycle" notice in the footer of the site.
 * Is using a six-year old Macbook for his work and for personal use. He does not want to buy another computer until his existing one is no longer working.
 * Website was designed to use as few resources as possible. I compress images before they are uploaded and I use images sparingly on the site. I have spent extensive time removing redundant styles on the style sheet. At one point, my site had no favicon to reduce the number of requests that had to be made for my site to load.
 * Features a "Reduce, reuse, recycle" notice in the footer of the site.
 * Is using a six-year old Macbook for his work and for personal use. He does not want to buy another computer until his existing one is no longer working.
 * Is using a six-year old Macbook for his work and for personal use. He does not want to buy another computer until his existing one is no longer working.

Services
web hosting:
 * GreenGeeks
 * Infomaniak
 * Krystal (UK/EU) use 100% renewable energy and support the rewilding/re-greening initiative Trees for Life (Scotland).
 * https://getgreenhosting.org: A guide to find web hosting that runs entirely on renewable energy, by

cloud
 * Katapult a British Cloud provider that runs on 100% renewable energy; same parent company as Krystal.

Amazon Web Services:
 * AWS & Sustainability

DigitalOcean:
 * A forum thread on the DigitalOcean community website suggests that DigitalOcean is using sustainable power in some of their data centers.

Organizations
Amazon, Google, Microsoft
 * 2019-12-10 WIRED: Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here's Who Has the Greenest Cloud

Mozilla
 * 2020-05-28 Mozilla’s journey to environmental sustainability

Individuals

 * Ruben Schade: https://rubenerd.com
 * TODO: need to expand this with a summary/additional links

Tools

 * Estimate your web page carbon footprint: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
 * Investigate your local electricity consumption CO2 emissions: https://app.electricitymap.org/map and https://www.watttime.org/ — Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumed by area (in case you’re considering carbon impact of where you host your webserver, including from your home!)
 * browser extension that may be useful, though possibly abandoned (unmerged PRs from 2020) https://theshiftproject.org/en/carbonalyser-browser-extension/

Brainstorming

 * 1) While looking for a new website host check their Sustainability policy.
 * 2) Using a static_site_generator as most web hosts have better deals because they don't need to charge for databases.
 * 3) Setup a tool like fail2ban to monitor access logs, detect signs of wasteful traffic, and act by blocking the source IP on the firewall. Traffic from that source no longer reaches the web-server, avoiding the need to send so much as a 404 page. Traffic considered wasteful including but not limited to bots of ill repute, malicious log-in attempts, and scripts scanning for backups and similar left in the public web root in error.
 * 4) * Bonus: Apply the firewall rule at a lower level of the network stack, e.g. on the infrastructure provider's edge firewall, using an API.
 * 5) Use a static_site so that each page does not need to be dynamically rendered
 * 6) Use algorithms like dithering (see Low Tech Magazine) to reduce the size of images
 * 7) Remove or reduce the amount of JavaScript on a page


 * DIY solar/battery powered SBC How to Build a Low-tech Website?.

Performance and green computing
There is a significant correlation between the performance of a website and green computing.

Many green computing efforts aim to reduce the impact of a website on the environment. This inevitably involves making a website do more with less.

This could mean using fewer images on a site, rendering web safe fonts instead of assets from a font repository like Google Fonts, or taking other steps to make your site smaller.

These changes would all make a site load faster. Both green computing and performance can be considered in the same context but a separation of concerns may be useful.

Performance enhancements refer to all of the changes made to optimize a site. Green computing measures are those taken specifically to reduce environmental impact. This distinction becomes more necessary if you want to justify the reasoning behind a change on your site. (i.e. you may change a blog post structure because it is too cluttered, or because you want to save on bytes)

cloud computing
Cloud computing companies claim because they can optimize server utilization compared to on-premises computing, that they use less power. But critics like Greenpeace claim that they are still using dirty power

static sites
Are static_sites the best option?

examples:
 * External resources like JavaScript, Cascading_Style_Sheets or fonts/icon_font, there are two options include with your website (more data to download) or use cloud hosted version (less data to download because it been cached in the web browser, but is reliant on third party host)
 * External interactive contents (webmention.io, Bridgy and Disqus) reliant on third party host.
 * A static_site_generator toolchain could defeat the whole reason for going static.
 * Continuous website deployment without caching and/or differencing.
 * Multiple static_site_generator build cycles in the toolchain.
 * User:vincentp.me's | mastr-cntrl

FAQs
This section is a stub and needs review. Several of the answers seem suspect or without sufficient explanation/citations for their claims. Tantek Çelik 13:58, 27 May 2020 (PDT)

Q: What is the difference in carbon footprint between different CMS vs static site?

A: a CMS ( content management system) pages are created | On-demand from a database, while a static site is pre-generated.


 * one major disadvantage with CMS is it can get overload which can cause the server to crash because it becomes CPU bound/Memory bound.


 * a static site is I/O bound which allows the site to host on anything including a Commodore 64, but don't expect large power savings by using old hardware.

Q: What is the difference in carbon footprint between playing local media and streaming media?

A: All of these places some responsibility on the listener, even if the steps they can take seem small. In an article for The Conversation published in January, Sharon George and Deirdre McKay outlined a few potentially greener methods of listening. '''They suggested buying a physical album may actually be more environmentally friendly if you plan to listen to it repeatedly, as 27 full streams would likely use more energy than it takes to produce and manufacture the same record. They also noted that downloading music from streaming services for offline listening could cut down on the energy it takes to get a song from the cloud to your ears'''	 - [https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/environmental-impact-streaming-music-835220/ Is Streaming Music Dangerous to the Environment? One Researcher Is Sounding the Alarm]

Q: How do you optimize images to reduce page weight?

A:

When Progressive enhancement image formats become standard ( Progressive Graphics File / ICER/ Progressive texture map ) I would use them. As a stop-gap use the Responsive image tag - personal option tomasparks

Q: What is the energy difference between shared hosting and a home server?

A: I don't think we'll ever be able to answer this question because there are too many variables.

Q: What is the energy difference between distributed networks like BitTorrent, Freenet, IPFS, GnuNet?

A:
 * BitTorrent/webtorrent/Zeronet: the energy usage is the average of the nodes in the swam.
 * Freenet: the Distributed data store energy usage is the average of the nodes in the swam. The data transfer is point to point, so there is no energy saving.
 * IPFS: ???
 * GnuNet: ???

''Q: Location data can be energy-intensive? How do we optimize the collection of GPS data.''

A: use | Inertial measurement unit with a GPS, I don't know if you can buy GPS/INS off the shelf

'''

Sessions
IndieWebCamp sessions related to green computing:
 * 2019/Berlin/carbon.txt: IndieWebCamp 2019 Berlin session on energy consumption of web hosting.