To back up a year’s worth of blog posts by the WordPress community, you would need 2,375 double layer Blu-ray discs.

26% of httparchive’s websites contain errors.

Nearly 7 trillion (!) of online data will be created in the next five years.

58% of the top 10,000 websites use Google Analytics.

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It’s happened often: We meet some one, they ask what we do, we tell them about Spot Cool Stuff and then they ask us how to make their own website.

When the person asking is computer proficient but is unfamiliar with (or uninterested in) HTML they would do well to consider uCoz, a free—and surprisingly powerful—website builder.

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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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