Enviromentally Friendly Blogging - Play Your Part

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If you don’t know what ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are, you must have been living on the moon for the past several years. The weird snowstorms in China and the unusually long and cold winter here in Karachi all are effects of climate change.

Image: bbjee

Every body’s doing what they can to play their role in reducing climate change and being more environmentally friendly. I think we bloggers also should do something on our part to help the environment. Don’t you think so?

Here are some things every blogger can do to reduce damage to the environment. Don’t forget to tell us your tips too!

Reduce Power Consumption

You can reduce the power (electricity, bandwith, etc) consumed by you and your blog in several ways and even though they may seem to have a little effect, you’re at least doing something!

Cut the connection

While writing posts, cut the internet connection. This will not only enable you to concentrate better on writing your post, but will also reduce the amount of internet bandwith used, be it as little as a few kilobytes. And less internet bandwith usage means less usage of resources. And therefore less damage to the environment.

I know it can be hard to live without the internet connection, but it’s worth the pain!

Turn off the lights in the room

You could do this if you have real good eyesight and there’s enough

natural

light around. Most people blog in a room that’s lit up by artificial, energy consuming lights. Even in the day, when there’s enough natural light. So, whenever you can, switch those lights off, maybe even after dark (the light coming out of the computer screen should be enough!). Or even better, buy one of those glow-in-the-dark keyboards with tiny built-in LEDs that light up the keys. Switch them on in the night and blog away, happy knowing that you helped the environment!

Or even better, use energy efficient artificial lights.

Reduce the size of your pages

You normally aim to reduce the page size of your blog’s pages anyways (for SEO, usability and other reasons) so why not for the environment?

Essentially, the equation looks like this:

Less page size = less load time = less internet bandwith usage = less usage of resources = less environmental damage

Kill unnecessary processes/programs

End those running processes or programs that you don’t need or aren’t using, and thus reduce processor usage and power consumption. You’ll find many processes running that you don’t need and are unnecessarily hogging up memory and processor capacity. Windows users: press Ctrl+Alt+Del to start up the Task Manager and under the Processes tab, end any unnecessary process that’s running. (Warning: You HAVE to know what you’re doing here. You can easily crash/mess up your system if you end an important process. So, be careful!).

Reduce the amount of time you’re on the computer

Consider the amount of time you spend on the computer daily. I bet most of that time is just wasted online, sitting idle or browsing sites for leisure. Believe me, shut the computer down in those times and go do something else, like exercise or study. By reducing your usage of the computer to an minimally essential, you’ll reduce power consumption by a great deal and will also be able to avoid becoming a blogaholic or internet/computer addict.

Go Green

Show your support for the environmental cause and go green. Change the colour of your theme to green, with leaves and flowers all over it. Promote products which are environmentally friendly and discourage/bash products which damage the environment. Start using environmentally friendly products and ditch the damage causing ones. Encourage other bloggers to do the same. Even better, open up a whole new blog about protecting the environment and build up a community. And the list conitnues…. . You just have to keep thinking!

The above are only some of the ways you (as bloggers) can play your part in protecting the environment. The above list is not a complete one by any means and any addition could be helpful. So, if you have something to add to the list, please tell the rest of us!

Update: I had accidentally turned off comments on this post and didn’t come to know what I had done till almost an hour later (just now) . Well it’s on now and you people can comment!

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