Busy Year for Green - February 28, 2013
2012 was busy for me, allowing me little free time to update this site. The new Windows® 8 operating system has some nice new lightweight features that enable faster functions for CPUs. There appears to be a growing trend for new laptops and notebooks to have CPUs of around 1ghz, which is good for lower power consumption and longer battery life, plus too, the new Windows 8 can run smoothly on the slower CPUs. Many Linux® distributions are similarly lightweight, but the general public is not ready for Linux. The Microsoft® websites have progressively grown lighter in weight, and their choice of fonts is quite good, so I chose to use similar fonts too. Google® has almost always remained lightweight for its search engine and apps, and it is good to see Microsoft being more competitive because competition usually always results in improved products for everyone.
In the four-plus years of this site being online we have witnessed a sizable step towards lighter-weight websites and software, and while it is unlikely that this site had any influence on the current trends, still it is pleasing to see that some of our goals are now being realized.
Our ranking on Google is back up to the top five, but hits from visitors remain to be slender; we are not in competition with anyone, so it's okay. If time permits, I may aim the site for higher rankings just because I prefer the number one spot, but for the moment green-Internet is ranked well enough. An interesting statistic is that Linux shows a strong 8.8% of visitors to the site, and Firefox® is the most popular browser by about 6%. Internet users with different interests tend to use different operating systems and browsers, and I found it interesting that the topic of green Internet draws a strong showing from Linux and Firefox users. Firefox is frequently used more often than other browsers, but considering that Linux only has around one to two percent of the operating system market, I'm impressed. Kudos to all you Linux users.
While I was updating other websites I decided that it was time to raise green-net.org up from HTML 4.0 to HTML 4.01. I continued using 4.0 up until recently due to compatibility issues with older browsers, but the competitive browser wars have resulted in most all browsers displaying HTML properly, so yeah it's time to finally become up to date with a thirteen year old version of HTML. ;-) And too, I finally got around to correcting some of the typos (my customers come first; my own websites get the least attention).
We also raised the maximum file size from 25kb to 50kb for ultra-green. The argument that loading additional pages can consume more bandwidth than one larger page does have merit, and so until further notice the ultra-green classification will apply to all pages of 50kb or less. I will likely continue to keep this home page under 25kb simply because I myself prefer the size, and too, the home page currently does not have a need for more room.
An item worthy of comment is the rapidly increasing scam/hack attacks on content management systems (CMS) like WordPress® and Joomla®. On one of my own WordPress blogs I was finally able to curb the scam posts, but the number of attempted hacks continued to escalate to the point that I finally decided that the stress was not worth the blog, so I deleted WordPress and went back to using a simple HTML page like this one. If an obscure little blog like mine was being hacker-attacked thousands of times a day, then I can only imagine how bad the attacks might be for major sites (I would wager that the number is in the millions, if not tens of millions, and perhaps over a billion each day). If you use a CMS, keep it updated, and keep all of your files backed up. Be safe!
Green Becomes Gray - May 25, 2012
This site went live in 2008, and though for the keywords "green internet" it remains ranked #1 on Bing® and Yahoo®, and has dropped from the top five to around #14 on Google®, the four year history shows the site only getting two to three unique visitors a day. The lack of interest in green topics is not uncommon; a lot of people talk about environmental concerns, but very few people apply that concern in their daily lives. Google is ranked as being the most popular website in the world with about 900 million hits a day, and yet out of all of those users only one or two individuals search for green internet. The percentage is small, and you the reader are the one person in a billion to have found this page.
In recent months Google has begun adjusting sites' search engine rankings by the sites' kb
usage. In the past it was not uncommon to find a website ranked #1 that had a home page of over 1meg in size. Under many keywords there are still found sites ranked well in spite of their kb, but under some topics a site may receive a higher rank if its home page is lightweight. There are numerous variables that earn a website a high ranking on search engines; some of the variables are based on useful standards, while some of the variables are too easily manipulated by webmasters who are less than honest. The competition for search engine ranking can be fierce, and the biggest problem that results from the competition is that the quality and usefulness of a site are too often ignored in favor of search engine ranking. Far too many junk sites are finding their way up into the top ten on search engines, causing a lowered quality for all users.
One of my biggest gripes is that some websites automatically forward the visitor to several different pages, so when the visitor clicks the back button to return to the search engine, the person instead only lands on one of the forwarded pages that redirects the visitor back to the site's page. The
practice is dishonest and deceitful, but it earns the website a high search engine ranking because the visitor appears to be staying long on that website (a portion of search engine rankings is derived by how long a person stays on a website). In recent months it has become much too common for Google's search results to rank virus-infected scam sites in the top ten. Thirty years ago the public would have demanded that the webmasters be jailed, but today it has become socially acceptable.
YouTube® is ranked the fourth most popular site with around 400 million hits a day (YouTube is owned by Google and yet it is always ranked well). The average Internet user is around 200 million times more likely to download and watch several megs of videos rather than be concerned with green topics. The general public does not care about nor want lightweight websites, and it is here that web designers are finding themselves struggling to maintain high search engine rankings by creating lightweight web pages, while also trying to insert enough flashy gadgets to attract the average Internet user.
My income is largely based upon how well my sites are ranked on search engines, and so I continuously adjust my sites to meet the preferences of search engines'. One of my sites on Google dropped from #1 down to #7 shortly after Google changed its weight restrictions, and so I updated the page by reducing its weight down to 18.66kb (including three graphics, one of which has a full page height). It will be interesting to see if the site's rank increases or decreases.
The topic of green is almost never what it implies; regardless of how important it might be for us to lower our impact on the environment, the bottom line is still dictated by the cost in dollars. The public does not want green websites, nor will major corporations reduce their website weight, and the most difficult thing for us to work with is that we are being told to reduce our website weights while the largest corporations earn higher search engine rankings with huge kb sites.
This site will likely remain active for many years to come because it is useful for SEO and because it consumes almost no resources beyond what are already being used to host the parent website (TheLogics.org). Too, the site is a useful yard stick to measure true public opinion.
View the Green Internet Updates page.
View the Certified Green Websites page.
Green-Internet graphics for webmasters can be found at the Green Internet page on The Logics site.