A smaller web footprint

Every few years I want to slim down my web properties and internet use. The internet is a globally a large user of electricity, thus a large producer of greenhouse gas emissions. But the bigger pain are overbuilt sites that tax my computers and eat up my mobile phone data. Our “everything online” lives in the pandemic doesn’t work for those without fast internet service, not to mention it’s thrilling to load a site that’s a light as a whisper, even on a phone. And in much of the world, that’s the difference between a site loading or having someone necessarily give up in frustration. Since so many of my sites are dedicated to Universalist Christianity, with the hope of spreading it, that won’t do.

As an interim step, I’m using this lighter theme here, and I shrunk the header image at revscottwells.com. I’ll survey my properties and make them as small as practical.

What inspired this now? The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s recent deployment of a low-bandwidth news site, as a service to dial-up and metered mobile phone users. There are other “lite” news sites, but none as attractive.

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

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