Re: Bringing the Green Web to WordPress [via Sustainable Web Design Community Group]

Hey Jack,

Thanks for posting this. 

> On May 4, 2018, at 1:59 PM, W3C Community Development Team <team-community-process@w3.org> wrote:
> With Mozilla's 2018 Internet Health Report finally shining a light on sustainability, and thanks to Chris Adams' presentation at MozFest last year, I've been inspired to seriously up my game in terms of helping wherever I can in this field.

Mozilla’s been such a great force looking at the health of the Open Web.
 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Internet_Health_Report

Is there a link to  Chris Adams’ presentation?

> As a first step, I've put together a very simple WordPress widget that allows users to easily add The Green Web Foundation's badge to their website. I think of the widget more as a marketing tool than anything else – i.e. it gets The Green Web Foundation into WordPress' shop window.

I like the The Green Web Foundation, but it isn’t being well supported.  I’ve been trying to get Amazon’s new green hosting listed:
 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/ <https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/>

But as I understand it the GWF has  “a self-service account environment where - normally - owners register their details and keep them up to date."

So far Amazon hasn’t stepped forward to do this.

> You can see the widget in action on my blog (bottom of the sidebar).

Cool.

> My next steps within WordPress are to create a theme that incorporates all of the sustainable web design techniques. My goal is to make a theme that can theoretically score 100 with Ecograder. I say theoretically because some things are dependent on the host, MozRank etc. But if, for example, I could get the demo site for the theme near to 100, that'd be awesome. And I could also centre all of the content on the demo site around Internet sustainability.

You know about these past talks about Sustainable UX:
 http://www.sustainableux.com/talks/

I like to look at this from a systems point of view, I wrote up this for Drupal:
 http://openconcept.ca/blog/mike/tips-sustainable-drupal-7-8-website

Similar stuff could be done for WordPress. 

> Also, hello everyone! I'm Jack and I work as an engineer on the WordPress.com VIP team. I'm rather passionate about environmental issues. :) I was the Green Party candidate in a UK parliamentary by-election last year which meant I appeared on TV a bit!

Most performance issues will have a sustainability impact:
 https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search?status%5B%5D=Open&issue_tags=performance

Also building in mechanisms like:
 https://www.drupal.org/project/imageapi_optimize

But generally with Drupal I try to ask myself, what could be fixed in core so that we don’t just fix the 1% of the users that actually add the extension, but that we are able to shift the whole community. We’ve done this with accessibility. Sustainability not so much.

Imagine if we could save 1% of the power used in all of the WordPress sites out there?  What if we could make incremental gains so that it was easier for everyone to understand how their users will have better experiences (and use less power) if sustainability wasn’t just an afterthought. 

Mike
-- 
Mike Gifford, President, OpenConcept Consulting Inc. 
Drupal 8 Core Accessibility Maintainer - https://drupal.org/user/27930
Twitter: @mgifford @openconcept_ca

Open source web development for social change - http://openconcept.ca
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