The eagle-eyed among you will notice a new ‘Green Website’ badge in the right sidebar of the site. So what does it mean? Well, because browsing the Web consumes a lot of energy on a global level, Online Leaf has developed a method to reduce the amount of energy needed to browse the internet, by making websites more energy-efficient.

Image via Wikipedia

The WordPress Online Leaf plugin which you can download here installs an energy-saving standby engine on your blog, and it is said by the developer to be a simple matter to run the code on other websites as well. The engine automatically activates a dark screen when site visitors are inactive, darkening colours and hiding animations and effects, so that the monitors displaying the site don’t waste energy generating these visuals. Dark colours, on many monitors, use less energy in being displayed than brighter ones.

The stated goal of the developer is to reduce the overall CO2 emissions produced by displaying websites, without any loss of visitor experience. By running the plugin you are actually saving energy for your readers. Although the amount of energy saved per reader is extremely small, it adds up when you consider how many people visit not only your site but others with the same engine installed.

You can still use visual effects, animations and heavy graphics to improve your website’s overall functionality and aesthetic appeal, and screen-reading softwares for the visually challenged, because the standby engine does not conflict with any of those things (it is only activated when your visitors are inactive, that is, when the page is being displayed but the reader is on a different tab in his or her browser, or has gone away from the computer).And a quick nudge of your mouse or trackpad brings everything back in a fraction of a second.

It might not seem to make much of a difference, one blog, one visitor, maybe just a few seconds of energy saved. The idea, though, is that this is an initiative to be taken up by as many website owners as possible, some getting just a handful of visitors a day, others thousands or even millions. If every website in the world conserved energy in this way, the savings would be colossal. An impressive start would be if the likes of wordpress.com, Google, Facebook and Twitter made use of the standby engine. But every energy-saving website, no matter how small, helps us all change and become more aware of the need to reduce our energy usage.

So, if you are responsible for maintaining a website, please consider installing Online Leaf today.

The keen-eyed among you, especially anyone leaving comments here, will have noticed over the past fortnight that the site comments have switched from Disqus to IntenseDebate before today switching back to Disqus again. The standard default WordPress in-built comments have appeared whenever neither of the other commenting systems have been running. So. Why?

A number of other bloggers have in the past written on the merits or otherwise of installing external commenting systems, and the pluses and minuses of Disqus and IntenseDebate. I’ve concluded both have serious failings but are more or less equal these days in terms of functionality and aesthetics.  All you can do if interested is try one for a week, try the other for a week, see what feels right for your blog and makes most sense to you in how it’s set up.

Any comments people leave while you’re test-driving are synched back into your WordPress database (and your old comments are imported into both Disqus and IntenseDebate), so you shouldn’t lose or corrupt any data at all by hopping around like this. Both systems perform well in my experience when it comes to import and export and maintaining a central integrity to your core WordPress comments.

I first tried IntenseDebate a long time ago and then switched to Disqus, which I stuck with a very long time and only got annoyed with and removed when it took over a week of waiting for an answer to my support message in the forums (along with, it seems, many more people judging by all the unanswered questions I spotted) and my email to the help address. I got auto-notifications from the help email address but nobody human ever contacted me as a consequence. That’s a very poor show.

If I hadn’t been a Twitter user posting messages about my frustration that contained the hashtag #disqus, which were spotted by a Disqus employee and then the CEO, I’d have had no responses at all. Eventually the CEO told me that the 403 error people were getting when posting comments here was a fault on my server, not theirs. He was truly apologetic for nobody having said this long before, but I was still none the wiser as to how I might solve the problem and only Disqus was giving me 403 grief. So I got rid of it and reported the issue with my webhost. My webhost, helpful as ever (is poor technical support to be found from every Internet company?), eventually replied with an email the tone of which suggested I was dim, having checked things out and finding no reason for the 403 error. But now it’s gone. Trust me, the 403 error was no figment of mine or my readers’ imaginations.

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