Last week in Part 1 of this piece I talked about how Progressive Lawyer is using Open Source software to power its infrastructure and how I believe that is the way to go versus proprietary software. This week in Part 2 I highlight how I am working to make the Progressive Lawyer website as sustainable as possible and why that is important. Again, I am not a professional web developer or designer but with the resources I have listed and some experimentation, anybody with a website can make their online home that much greener and for that we all win!
The issue of sustainable web design and the corresponding issue of the energy usage of the Internet are intricately linked and drawing increasing attention. As we have been moving our lives online, a lot of people are starting to study the carbon footprint of all this activity in order to determine how to mitigate its environmental effects. The growing use of Facebook, Twitter, Google Search, iTunes, the cloud, Amazon, Pinterest, etc. is having an increasingly detrimental effect on our environment but the good news is that it isn’t all bad. Despite the growing demand requiring greater server usage and therefore increasing energy consumption, companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook are using cutting edge technology and renewable energy sources to power their voracious server farms. Greenpeace has done some excellent work documenting the Green Internet and their latest report “Your Online World: #ClickClean or Dirty?” highlights both the trendsetters and the environmental laggards when it comes to operating a green data center.