Sign in
Log inSign up
Brock Herion

118 likes

2.0K reads

24 comments

Developer Avocado
Developer Avocado
Jul 5, 2022

It was great article Brock Herion, I really enjoying your writing style 馃グ And theme of green web is very interesting, keep going!

22
Ismael Velasco
Ismael Velasco
Jul 4, 2022

It's fantastic to see someone else blogging on green web and sustainability!

Loved your 90% emissions reduction: it shows how it doesn't take a lot to make a big difference.

You might even want to add your website to this fantastic directory of low carbon websites. I know the maintainers are always looking for more! lowww.directory

Also, for more techniques to combine low emissions with high interactivity, I found this to be a fantastic resource: awwwards.com/how-to-deliver-a-highly-emoti…

Hope you keep diving into this area. We need as many devs as possible to mainstream green software. Feel free to reach out any time.

4
2 replies
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 4, 2022

Thank you so much Ismael! It just goes to show that no matter who you are or where you came from, we can all do our part to help create a greener, most sustainable world.

I'm not seeing the links you provided though. I would love to take a look at them!

Ismael Velasco
Ismael Velasco
Jul 4, 2022

Brock Herion odd, have a look at my post on getting started as a climate friendly dev, where I have a bunch of links you might find useful, including the ones I weirdly forgot to add! It's my first blog post here, so any feedback hugely appreciated!

5
Chris Bongers
Chris Bongers
Jul 5, 2022

Agree with the comments, super happy to see someone write about being green on the web.

It's been an aspiration of myself to write about this, as I do take it into account.

Pro tip: Are hosting this via cloudflare pages? They provide a carbon emission report. I think they where even 100% green last year if I recall correctly.

Thanks for inspiring me to put it on my backlog 馃コ

3
1 reply
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 5, 2022

Hey Chris, you're welcome! Always happy to provide some inspiration every now and again 馃榿

I am not hosting on Cloudflare pages. I'm using Vercel for my hosting, but I'm eager to give pages a try. I had no idea they did carbon emission reports! Definitely going to give it a try now

1
Eleftheria Batsou
Eleftheria Batsou
Jul 5, 2022

I've never thought about that!

As other people mentioned in the comments, it's nice to see someone writing about it.

Every small action count and the climate crisis is real, so let's make our website friendlier :)

3
1 reply
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 5, 2022

Thank you, Eleftheria! It's not something I had thought about either until I was reading through some of the literature on Plausible. It's something so small but makes so much sense. And you are right, every action, no matter how small, goes a long way in fighting climate change

Jeremy Ikwuje
Jeremy Ikwuje
Jul 4, 2022

Great write up.

At first, I wonder what a website has to do with that 馃榿. But after reading, I know how important it is.

2
2 replies
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 4, 2022

Thank you, Jeremy! Yeah, I didn't stumble on this idea until I was reading more about Plausible and its mission.

Ismael Velasco
Ismael Velasco
Jul 4, 2022

And that's just the beginning! Web technologies account for as many carbon emissions as all the airplanes in the world! The good news is that by doing stuff like Brock shares here, and specially by hosting your website/web application in a green cloud provider (e.g. AWS has three zones on the way to being 100% powered by renewable emergy, and there's other green cloud providers), you can really make a difference.

1
Gheorghe Avram
Gheorghe Avram
Jul 5, 2022

Since next.js isn't made for static websites but for SSR first, it's pretty clear why that carbon energy is generated. Using static site builders is an improvement since the content can be cached at the CDN level as well, so the user traffic travels very little and no server rendering for the request has to be done. And in addition to that using something like cloudflare pages to host your static site is the most green option there is since they themselves are fully green i believe but they also provide you with a carbon report. Anyways, great writeup.

2
1 reply
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 5, 2022

Absolutely! Next is a great tool, but there are other options for static sites that just do it better. I'm curious about using Cloudflare pages though, Chris also mentioned them being a green platform. Definitely going to look into it!

R Chan
R Chan
Jul 5, 2022

Amazing read! Thanks for sharing this Brock Herion馃殌

1
1 reply
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 5, 2022

You're welcome Rohini! Glad you enjoyed it

1
Khushi Jain
Khushi Jain
Jul 5, 2022

wow! thanks for this

1
Ammaar Aslam
Ammaar Aslam
Jul 5, 2022

I have never seen anyone writing about being green on the web. Really nice to see someone taking the time and writing about it. Thanks Brock Herion馃

1
Oliver Jones
Oliver Jones
Jul 8, 2022

This is good stuff, thanks for bringing it to everybody's attention.

Lots of back-end-heavy websites are out there, burning power in datacenter servers and databases as well as routers, fiber-optic drivers, and end-user computers. I personally have been working on making WordPress's database operations faster and more efficient. There's lots of CO2 leverage there because there are many of those sites. (Yeah, we could outlaw WordPress because it's a power hog, but, that won't work.)

It's time for everybody to start thinking about web power footprint!

1
Andr茅s Chapo
Andr茅s Chapo
Jul 12, 2022

Awesome!

1
Oliver Jones
Oliver Jones
Jul 20, 2022

This is great stuff! I hope Google decides to add some kind of carbon calculator to Lighthouse: we can't fix what we don't measure.

For what it's worth, the Core Performance Team at wordpress.org offers a Performance Lab plugin to do stuff like convert images to the lighter-weight webp format, and many other things. wordpress.org/plugins/performance-lab

(Yeah, I know, WordPress is old tech. But, it's not dead yet. It still powers something like 40% of the websites on the web by website count not traffic. So there's a LOT of carbon-saving leverage to be had by making it more efficient.)

1
1 reply
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 22, 2022

Yeah absolutely! Optimizing existing tech helps with performance (which is always a plus) and with reducing energy usage when running. It's a win-win!

Elvis Van
Elvis Van
Jul 5, 2022

Damn, that didn't go well for a Next.js enthusiast馃槄

1 reply
Brock Herion
Brock Herion
Author
Jul 5, 2022

Hey, I still love Next.js! Like I said tho, brockherion.dev is a mostly static site. Next is able to handle it without so much as breaking a sweat, but there are just some tools that do it a little bit better.

1
Elvis Van
Elvis Van
Dec 21, 2022

how about performance test? where do you and most fellow developers you know test site's performance?