After my frustrating discovery last week of the large greenhouse gas emissions from the official COP26 summit website, I decided to try and recreate it in a more performant and environmentally-friendly form.
The first version of https://climate-friendly-cop26.org/ has just gone live. It is a little rough around the edges, being the product of a single developer over the course of a day, but it already provides a lower emission alternative to reading the content on the main site. Hopefully, it should also demonstrate that building fast and planet friendly websites is no more difficult than building their slow and high-emissions brethren.
The source code is available on github if anyone wants yo contribute by adding-in some of the missing content, or fixing some of the visual bugs. Hopefully next week I'll find time to produce a more in-depth write-up.
Top comments (3)
I love this! ❤
It would be even better (if you have time) to recreate the original website identically as that would have a profound impact when you say "400kb vs 8,000kb" and do some napkin maths on how much CO2 it could save!
Not a criticism at all, purely a "I would love to see it" as this is a great way of showcasing the bloated crap some people create!
Thank you!
I would also love to have a go at a total recreation. What with the amount of content on there, I'm not sure I could manage it, but may well give the homepage a go if I have time next week.
The current plan is to add more to it. I just wanted to get an initial version out there while the conference is in full swing. Definitely more to do, the dropdown menu is being weird, but I suspect that's purgecss being a little too aggressive on what it removes.
I look forward to seeing v2.0, I still can't comprehend 8mb gzipped for that page, I would get a rocket to the moon for that 😉🤣