It probably isn’t feasible for you to drive an all-electric vehicle, grow your own organic food or power your house entirely off of solar panels. That’s okay. It can make a big difference to the planet when of people take small steps towards reducing their carbon footprint.
Like using a more environmentally-friendly website host.
Website hosting is a surprisingly electricity-intensive (and thus surprisingly polluting) enterprise. A single website server can produce as much as 12.5 tones of CO2 each year. It is estimated that by 2020 the website hosting companies will be as polluting as the airline industry!
Fortunately, there are a variety of green website hosts. We’ve found several that offer as good a service, for as cheap a price, as the regular polluting hosting companies provide. Here are our three favorites:
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TrafficSwarm and LinkReferral are two of the best amongst the dozens of traffic exchanges websites. The basic premise of all of them is the same: You sign up for a free account, register your blog or website link, and in exchange for clicking on the links of other members’ they will click on yours. It is there, though, that the similarities end. Which service is better, TrafficSwarm or Link Referral? Read on . . .
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We love blogging. We love the WordPress blog platform.
We are not enamored by most blog hosts.
If you want to run a WordPress blog with your own domain name (which we suggest) then you’ll need to find a good website host. But it’s a hyper-competitive business, website hosting is. To cut costs most hosting companies skimp on service and reduce their reliability standards. Hosting companies generally get away with this (for a few months, anyway) because most customers make their choice of host by looking at the price and nothing else.
Do not be one of those customers. The difference between a low and high quality host is the difference between your WordPress blog being down a few minutes per month and being down hours (or days!); it is the difference being able to talk to hosting company technician on the phone and being relegated to seeking help through maddening online chat system.
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see all the color palettes that include a particular shade of fuchsia, for example
If you are a graphic artist looking for the perfect pattern or color palette to use for your design then you’ll love Colour Lovers.
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We wish there were some sort of Life Tracker equivalent.
Many a bride-to-be—and none too few grooms—have nightmares about the logistics of their upcoming wedding. The invitations, the music, the catering, the flowers, the rehearsal dinner and on and on and on . . . keeping it all organized is tedious and stressful.
To help engaged couples rest easy there’s Wedding Tracker, an online service through which you can not only organize your wedding but to build your own personalized wedding website as well. The service costs $60 (or $25 if you only want the website builder). To see if Wedding Tracker was worth it we tried it out:
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Our travel blog, like all of Spot Cool Stuff, runs on WordPress. Over the months we’ve downloaded and activated many dozens of WordPress plugins. And then deactivating almost all of them. Most plugins are too buggy, too time consuming, and/or too unimportant to bother with.
There are, however, five plugins that we think any WordPress travel blogger should seriously consider using. Each works with WP version 2.7 and 2.8.
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Spot Cool Stuff is a big fan of Twitter. We are not fans of those various URL shortening services that transform long but logical URLs (eg. http://web.spotcoolstuff.com/category/seo-website-building) into shorter ones that look like they were written in Hungarian (eg. http://u.mavrev.com/przy). We’ve noticed with some alarm that shortened URLs are starting to appear in the comments sections of blogs too. Who knows what sort of site you are going to when you click on one of those?!
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Creating widgets—those modules of content and functionality that can be plugged into any website html code—was once the work of trained programmers. No more. Widgets can now be created by nearly anyone through a wysiwyg editor on a new site, Sprout. Tinker with one of Sprout’s widget templates or start with a blank slate. Then import images, video, audio and/or Flash files, build slide shows, incorporate RSS feeds, add backgrounds, glow effects and links and there you have it: your own professional looking widget. (Check out the promo video after the jump.)
Of course, making a widget is only half the point. Getting people to see and use your widget is the other half. For that, Sprout makes it easy to add your widget to MySpace, Facebook or your own website. An intuitive “share” functionality allows your widget to spread virally. And you can keep track of all the views your widget is getting on the cool Sprout website.
GO TO THE SITE
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