Time for a more sustainable blog theme

We Are Open Co-op is currently helping the Greenpeace Planet 4 team work more openly. The way we’re framing open source contribution to the project is as a practical way to address the climate emergency.

Another way of fighting global warming is to use less energy. If you have a website, you can do this by requiring users to download less data.

It was time for me to update my blog theme, so I had a look through the WordPress theme directory (yawn) and then through GitHub. I tried a few for size, and settled on Susty, a theme which is less than 7KB in size. That’s tiny.

The theme’s creator explains that it was inspired by a session he attended at the Mozilla Festival:

As a brief recap, I attended MozFest in London last year. In between sessions I was scanning a noticeboard to see what was coming up, and I spotted a session entitled “Building a Planet-Friendly Web”. I felt a little dumbstruck. What on Earth was this going to be about?

I attended the session, and the scales fell from my eyes. In what now seems obvious but at the time was a revelation, I learnt of the colossal energy demand of the Internet. That this demand makes it the largest coal-fired machine on Earth, meaning that its CO₂ emissions are probably at least equivalent to global air travel. More and more people are coming online, but this coupled with the rise of ever more obese websites means that the Internet’s energy demands are growing exponentially. Every additional byte transferred means more energy, which in most countries means more CO₂.

It’s a small change, and I’ve plenty to do with my other sites (including Thought Shrapnel) but this is the site of mine that gets the most traffic, so I may as well start here!

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This post is day eight of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com