Niggles and blog posts on sustainable web dev, green web design, SEO, digital sustainability, marketing and more. Published ad hoc by Rose Newell.
The usual places people go to find emojis online are so heavy! It’s sort of ironic, given how efficient HTML/Unicode emojis are when you use them in place of a heavy image or icon in your web design. There are a few handy tools for offline use – Firefox or Chrome add-ons, for example. Most, everything is needlessly displayed as pictures, showing you how the emoji looks in every system. But not…
I recently shared my Advanced DNS Checker on Github. It’s a node.js script that can pull and backup an unparallelled list of DNS records for any domain.
When I launched this website, I did it in light mode. Aware of the accessibility considerations, that was the considered choice I made. The problem was that this really messed with my synaesthesia, since it was my site and I can’t see my own 'personality colours’. I was never really happy with the design until I added the dark mode. That also required creating a custom-coded switcher and carefully…
Seriously, why load a whole icon set for something tiny when an HTML emoji will do? They’re like a system font – always already there without any effort. So much more efficient, and you can do cool things with them in CSS. Don’t forget they exist. They’re so established they’re basically glowing with retro charm. 💻 🔧 ⚙️ 📡 🔍 🖱️ 🌐 💾 💡 📊 🔗 🔒👍💼 📈 💡 🌟 💬 📊 🔑 💻 🏆 📅 📣 💪 🎯
This is a funky one. Firstly, many WordPress and other cookie plugins are set up so amateurishly that they are nothing more than decoration. Because you know, the scripts and cookies are loaded regardless if you entered them elsewhere in your theme or SEO plugin, or messed up the configuration process. But more than that, many depend on external scripts provided by a CDN to load and run. That’s…
I’m obsessed with SVGs. Eventually, I’ll have enough basic social media icons optimised that I can publish and share them as a set. But through that process I’m discovering some awful stuff. Web designers generally favour SVGs and icon sets in general. They are simple, scale well, and look good. But there are two huge issues that crop up time and time again. Many are fundamentally poorly…
AVIF is sold by some as the new WEBP. Hmm. It seems obvious that there needs to be an adequate balance between compression and client-side computing requirements. Sure, AVIF allows people to shrink their page size and carbon score (when calculated largely by page weight...) accordingly. However, that’s part of the limitation of those carbon scores: computing isn’t currently taken into account, and…
This one keeps coming up, especially in the context of sustainable web development. You mention sustainability, and someone perfectly nice says they are into it, too, perhaps in an effort to push their own services. But their work just is not covering the basics. It’s awkward when it happens in public, because you’re effectively forced to contradict them to avoid the definition being watered down.…
Make the website multilingual, they said. Installed a performance-killing plugin, they did. So much code for so little purpose. Meanwhile, translators get to work with texts squeezed into the exact same structure. eCommerce, I get it. Microsites? I really don’t. Or I do. The devs hired clearly never pondered creative an alternative, like I did. Even better? Those JavaScript ones that load slowly…
You’re better off doing it yourself than hiring the wrong professional. Updated for Earth Day, here’s how to DIY web design.
CDNs can deliver content more efficiently. This applies especially to commonly used assets, such as jQuery. Under GDPR, CDNs are a grey area. Strictly speaking, like Google Fonts, jQuery should be self-hosted because while you could argue it’s technically necessary, you can always self-host to avoid unnecessary sharing of your IP address with a third party without consent. Yet if multiple sites…
Or at least, it shouldn’t be treated like one. It’s a hallmark of bad, unsustainable web design and dependence on bad builders when you see that in the list of sources. It’s completely excessive. Better: Integrate individual SVGs you wish to use, as needed. Oxygen is great for this.
JavaScript is less predictable in terms of user experience and carbon output, since it’s all dependent on the client (user) device. This gets problematic when many builders use it excessively, often bundling multiple functions or large libraries that aren’t needed. They can often be render blocking, which is bad for technical performance (loading and rendering speed), affecting technical SEO and…
I’ve come across a few cases of badly designed websites that hide and show entire sections and divs on different page sizes rather than using media queries to change how they are displayed. Sometimes, even H1-6 tags and other key details are changed. That’s not going to be great for performance OR SEO, since duplicate content – especially H1-6 tags – are a problem and an indicator of a site that…
Caching. I can’t find the quote from some guy from Google complaining about this on Twitter, but a huge portion of the web isn’t using caching like they should. This is often a test even otherwise sustainable websites fail on Ecograder or PageSpeed. Maybe better guidance is needed? The HTTP Archive shared some stats in their 2024 almanac. 25% of websites – even today – are not using any caching at…
Builders load so much CSS by default, and it’s pretty hard to disable them. Similarly, while some do offer options to enable or disable certain features and their associated CSS. They don’t really explain the impact of having things enabled ‘just in case‘ they might want to use them at some point. It makes sites slower for users, and a lot of data is both transmitted and processed unnecessarily.
Why do most builders default to big > small rather than small > big? As in, media queries are generated as max-width as opposed to min-width by default. This results in additional processing on mobile devices, right where the impact on user experience and device wear and tear is greatest. These days, responsive design shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. This behaviour is a legacy from the…
Something funny happens if you right click on an image or try copy something from my site. Now you can do similar.
TL;DR: If you own a domain and let that domain expire, Microsoft might disclose all sorts of information to the next owner.