 If you've ever seen this article, which I kinda like, it lets you know that your personal carbon footprint was a little slogan developed by an ad agency at the request of British Petroleum to help make you feel guilty for stuff that larger, like commercial interests do. So with that, maybe you don't have to feel guilty about whether you recycle or not, or whether your websites are particularly fast slash energy efficient. But I would argue that you want to do it anyway because you care about stuff like this. Accessibility, and we're talking about accessibility in a couple different ways. There's kind of, you know, lighter websites are easier to process for screen readers, less messy. They're going to work better for people who have limited bandwidth. There's a lot of stuff in the way that this impacts how people experience your sites. That's nice. I think personally just doing a better job at something, like making it a little neater, a little less crazy, understanding the pieces that I'm using and why. A little more intimately has been a nice process for me. I kind of like that minimalist stuff. And in the bottom of the list there, I can't hurt to save a little bit of energy here or there. This is part of a larger trend and we'll look at some of the stuff, but like think about it. Like when we throw these big unsplash images at the top of every post, whether it needs it or not, just to have people scroll right down to get to the stuff they actually want. That's a global pattern that you see. And it's even worse when that unsplash image is 5,200 pixels across and it's being seen on a 1,400 pixel screen or something. Like this stuff's been going on for a while. And I heard this just this morning on a podcast, right? Like when you embed a mastodon toot, which is just a horrible word. It's going to load, react, font awesome, two versions of the Roboto font. And all these things are self-hosted on each individual mastodon install so it doesn't even give you the kind of caching niceness of CDN delivery. So this was complaining they had like four mastodon posts and the website, you know, page balloon to 10 megabytes. So the way we kind of build stuff on the web is a lot of this like, well, that's what they gave me. And it's attached to these other things which exist and are part of like big packages and stuff that we may or may not need. Now, I could not believe Brian Alexander to use this website this morning because this is my favorite website in the world. And they break down how they made it energy efficient. And this is to me like when we, they talked earlier in a couple of things about like dreaming the future. Like if you want to dream the future, this site is it. Everything is optimized towards energy efficiency. It's run on solar power off in Barcelona, Spain. And if it's cloudy for too many days in a row, the website goes off, right? To me, that's a commitment, right? This is not like I'm going to store in this giant lithium battery. This person thought this stuff through went all the way to the end of the line and said, here's my line in the sand and I'm sticking to it. And like to me like, oh, I love people who do that kind of crazy stuff. And you can see like they did their the images and compressed the hell out of them, but it becomes almost like a visual artifact that's attractive and interesting. And they break down even how they process the images to make them nice and compact. And I just show it again as an example of like how far you can go and how things can still become beautiful and interesting to look at. But without all the bloat that we often see associated with this stuff. And this is another one I decided to throw in after that since Brian stole my thunder. This is a project, or was it Swarthmore? And they ran so they could switch servers that were powered in different solar environments as the sun moved in different places. So I mean, there are ways even to make that kind of commitment sustainable in different ways. So I just think it's it's really cool to see when people are thinking this stuff through and how they're thinking about it. And there are because I promised I would show you some tools to look at your sites like this. This is a website carbon calculator. I have our D link. I'm Tom Woodward. I work at Middlebury College. And this is our site dlink.migcreate.net. And it runs on relic reclaim hosting. And our page is dirtier than 50% of the web pages that have been tested on this. Perhaps biased, but it kind of works you through the carbon usage, assuming, you know, around 10,000 monthly page views. And then it gives it to you in cups of tea and sumo wrestlers and trees and stuff. So that's one of the tools that tries to make a direct connection to carbon usage. It's all messy and it's not pretty, but like it's it's a thing that you can kind of think through. Let me show you a few more kind of stats so you can kind of see where we're moving in the world. You can just see what's been going on with the size of websites over time. You know, here we're starting around 500 kilobytes back in 2011. And here we are at 2.3 megabytes now. And that's just average stuff. We're six minutes in. Jesus. Let me show you this one because I think this is super fun. So one, you're going to see Facebook, which may make some of you twitchy, but like. And I'm in the network tab of my inspect element stuff. What I want you to see is down here at the bottom. I think I can zoom in a bit more. You see this piece right here, 2,124 requests. We're at 58 megabytes transferred 146 megabytes of resources. And of course, as I continue to scroll, more stuff will continue to load for forever. And you look at these numbers start to climb and you think about how people use the internet and the web and you, you know, like it's super crazy. Because I had never done this on this because what do I care what Facebook does or Instagram for that matter. When I was getting ready for this, I took a look at it and I was just like, holy cow. This is insane. And it just it'll just keep running for forever. Amazon, when you're scrolling along there, there's an art project that kind of shows you how that energy starts to get used and you just see these numbers climb for forever. And that's why I say our individual little sites in academia, compared to these things getting hit by millions and millions of people. There's another art project that's pretty good. And I'll send this list out of like links and crap like that on the Discord server. I'm just not that organized. But I will get to it. All this stuff is happening. It's absolutely crazy. I don't think we're going to stop it as individuals, but our own practice, I think can feel at least redeeming. And that's kind of what I'm going for. And we can do it maybe in the middle of the road where we don't necessarily have to learn about solar batteries and stuff. This is one example that I did around this idea of digital technologies and the environment. So you can see I've got the size and the speed calculated here on the refresh here. We were using WordPress anyway. So this is just a front end that was written in a little bit of JavaScript and HTML that uses WordPress as JSON data to make stuff. So I wasn't going to change and make people write and text files or markup. Things still use WordPress. Things still write on that. But when we load this site, which I'll do real quick. So I'm going to do inspect so we can watch it load. I'm going to click on like that. I like that. Network and I'm going to hit refresh. And that page refreshed. And you can see what we got here. We got five requests. We got 100 kilobytes. All this stuff happens really, really fast because we got rid of like the database query because this isn't changing rapidly. What you can do is take advantage of stuff like in WordPress got this blob of JSON. That's the text file. When it gets written, we can just stick it in a folder. We don't even have to do the live stuff. Just anytime there's a post in the detox category, that thing gets updated once. And then this site just looks there rather than running through the whole expensive time energy database look up to generate that content. So you can build like little tiny patterns like that that help you make super fast light sites. And I mean, like it's not gorgeous, but you can do little things with CSS that make it interactive that make it like it doesn't have to be ugly, you know, and it doesn't have to be non interactive. And that thing doesn't work anymore because this is two years ago. Web moves fast, right? And this background is the only image on the site. Even that text, the 3D effect is just by doing like layered box shadows and CSS. So you start to think about like, how am I going to create visual effects differently that don't weigh as much as other things? And it's all default text fonts. So it's another thing to think about. Every time you ask for something, every time you use an external library, Google fonts, they're free. All that stuff is another request that slows things down, uses more energy. So when you can internalize things or use stuff that's already in there and built in the computer, all those things are better. You can track these things like I did, you know, just by going to inspect. And if you're in Google or Firefox or ARC or any of those things, and you just refresh it when you're on the network, you can see certain things. You can do the performance analysis here as well. If you don't like that stuff, there's a couple different page site analysis things you can do. There's this one, which I think is Google. But there are others like this one, which is not Google in case you don't like that. You know, there are different ways to analyze your sites and look at the speed. But you're always trying to go like, does this media really matter? Should it be this big? Should it exist at all? How many things am I asking for across how many places? If we analyze our D-Link site, dang it, two minutes over already. I think we ask for like 107 different items. So when I go to D-Link here, and WordPress can be bad about this, especially if you turn on a bunch of plugins, because each one's like, I don't know if they have jQuery or the version of jQuery I like, or this thing, and they just add and staple on JavaScript libraries and CSS libraries and things like that. And then you end up with this, 103 different requests on a single page load. That's ugly. There's a couple ways you can deal with that. There are plugins that will help you minify and consolidate those things if you're not a programmer. But also keep that stuff lean if you can. Don't install a million plugins and activate them on a single site. Less is more in most cases. Chances are your user didn't want to see this giant picture anyway. And rethinking what a website should look like for you. Is this so important that we want every single thing above the fold to just be this? That's a degree of arrogance there. But maybe rightfully so. But I mean those kind of thoughts and thinking through like, how's your site loading? What's these things that we're seeing? Do these pictures even make sense? In our case, I come off, you know, kind of aggressive because I'm like, I don't know about this picture. Should it exist? It brings up accessibility concerns with that language. You know, are we duplicating that in all texts? Yada, yada, yada. So all that stuff comes up. All right, we're already done. Jesus. We have like a minute. Is there a question? Half a question that I won't answer. Yes. So I should close on my tabs then? No. Many tabs is possible open. I think that's the way I live my life. Can you not see this? It looks very similar to what I'm looking at. Right. So yeah. Yeah, like, I don't, I mean, like, I think that's the thing. Live your life, be happy. Make better websites for people. Not really, because it's going to save the world. Because it's not capitalism is a problem. Not JavaScript libraries. So like, I don't know if we're going to undo all that with this, but it is at least a little thing I can control and help with and be better about because it will make individual users' lives better. Yes, Timmy. Well, I haven't on the user end. We've played around with insanity on the WordPress end. So like, when you're giving this to people who maybe don't care about this in a network scenario, you activate the plug-in insanity. You can set some don't make pixels wider than this or this. So you can help kind of get a handle on that. Problem here is unsplash. It's giving you 5,000 pixel images. Your phones are giving you a billion pixel images. And a lot of our users are just throwing them up on WordPress full-size. So you got storage stuff. You got 100 of them in a post. And this at least helps keep a little bit of a border on that. WordPress does some resizing things based on the viewing stuff, on the nicer themes, I think, but not necessarily across all of them, at least that I'm aware of. Absolutely. Yeah. Yes? Is there a scale that does make a difference? Like, there are ways that we can simplify plugins. They're used by thousands of sites. Like, is that the scale that's worth it yet? If, you know... I think, like, I don't know where, like, website browsing electricity usage versus jets comes in in the scheme of carbon. You know what I mean? Like, I think that's the thing with it. It's something of such immense scope. I mean, what we saw from the COVID stuff is that, like, hey, when we didn't drive and go places, did that radically change our carbon output? It did not. So if that didn't do it, the chances of us radically changing it with a website or maybe we made it up for all of it with Netflix streaming, I don't know. It's a complicated question. I just feel like no one should feel like these little websites that we run with our limited audiences is going to make or break, like, the world of demons that we've created through so many different means. Do this because it makes you happy and you feel like it contributes to something. Awesome. You want to do, like, the solar side and make your site close when it's cloudy. I would love you forever. I may run a server myself just to have it shut down on cloudy days. I'd be out there, like, covering it with an umbrella. And I'd be, like, sight down due to shade. And it'd be a beautiful thing. I kind of like it, like, the idea of organic-ness bleeding over into the technology. I mean, like, how cool is that? And I'm now three minutes over. So I don't know. I love this stuff. I think it's fun and interesting to play around with. It's a topic that goes in a million different directions with lots of different things at lots of different levels of technology, you know, and lots of different ways to look at it. Rachel showed me, I think, this version this morning. This is to start up WordPresses and run them and put them static on places. So if you didn't want to do JSON stuff and things, there are lots of different other weird options. There are plugins that bleed into this stuff that let you opt out. All that stuff makes everything faster. Gets rid of the database, but you still use the tools that you're familiar with. I don't know. There's lots of different interesting options. And I...