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Raising Awareness for the Carbon Cost of our Systems
by JamesOne of my original reasons for building Tanzawa was I wanted a blogging engine that, while pleasant to use, put a hard focus on efficiency for the express purpose of reducing carbon emissions. This has informed a number of architecture decisions in Tanzawa itself: no big background tasks, no db server, only make optimized images on their first request to save disk / cpu and more.
To bring this in to focus, each page on Tanzawa has a badge that from websitecarbon.com that measures and reports the amount of carbon required to get that page from my server in Germany to you. It's not perfect, but it raises awareness.
I don't run any analytics on my site, so I have no idea how often people click on things on my site, but my buddy mario saw I post I wrote andΒ decided to test his own fusioncast.fm website.Mario is using carbon as a guide in his website redesign
This is the first documented instance I have of people being inspired to reduce the carbon impact of their sites based on my work! One site down, a million left :) -
Response to
by James1. No more societal and political discussions at Basecamp.
2. No more paternalistic benefits.
3. No more committees.
4. No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions.
5. No more 360 reviews.
6. No forgetting what we do here.I don't work for and don't use Basecamp/Hey, but this was a difficult and disappointing read.Β
Not allowing societal and political discussions at work is a tough call, depending on the internal state at Basecamp. With so much injustice in society finallyΒ coming to a head, people are going to want to talk about it with other members of society (their co-workers). If the company chat (though this is Basecamp, maybe they don't have one?) is a dumpster-fire 9 - 5 with non-stop political discussions, it speaks to a larger issue with the company culture and individual impulse control.
Blanket disallowing political discussion removes the opportunity to teach employees a valuable life skill on the internet: learning to not argue on the internet and ignoring the trolls because they will always have more time than you. It seems to me that you'd be better served by taking the instigators aside and having a frank conversation about time management. Learning to turn on the blinders and focus on the task at hand is an important skill.
Removing the "paternalistic benefits" was also disappointing to see. We know without a doubt that exercise is good for us. Getting food from the farmer's market not only gets you quality product, but also strengthens your local community. These are things we should want to encourage.Β
Saying that we're giving you a profit share and you can spend your money how you'd like ignores the psychological aspect of these kinds of benefits. Having that little bit of "extra" or "free" makes it mentally much easier for employees to make better choices that benefit everyone. -
The Week #42
by James- Tokyo is entering another State of Emergency. I understand why their doing it, Kanagawa should probably also be declaring one. But these half-measures for the past year(!) and a glacial rollout of the vaccine, I feel like I'm getting close to the "pandemic wall".
- I finished and submitted the first draft (to be published in June) of a magazine article I'm writing (Japanese) for an internal review at work. I always get a bit nervous before submitting these kinds of things, like they'll suddenly realize "wait a minute, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about". Getting your Japanese nitpicked and seeing grammar mistakes that you know you learned back in college is also humbling.
- Hoshide-san successfully launched and made it the ISS. Always happy to see JAXA astronauts fly.Β
- I ordered the new Bourdain book β Word Travel: An Irreverent Guide. Although Bourdain has been dead a couple of years (something I still think about on occasion and get sad about the loss), this new book was a work in progress until just before he passed. Apparently he was slated to work on it for a couple of weeks that summer. Either way I think it fits exactly what I've been wanting to read: something not heavy, not work related (no tech/design), non-fiction, and something in English. Excited for it to arrive.
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by JamesLeoβs new favorite pastime is to crawl around the car and listen to music. He switched the radio station and Journey comes on. Immediately says βI like thisβ. Addaboy.Β
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The wind is so strong, last night it blew the cover off my bike, blew the e-bike over, and its cover has disappeared. Time to see if I can find it.
Update: Found it a few houses down stuck under their car. -
by JamesMade some optimizations to my site today.Β
- Enabled the django gzip middleware so html is compressed over the wire. Practically speaking, responses loads should be about 5kb now, or a quarter of the previous size.
- Optimized the queries for public facing pages. All pages now require less than 10 queries.
- All optimized images will now be automatically resized by 50% and converted to webp (where supported). This helps reduce images sizes from drastically, usually to around 100k or less, each.
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Checkin to γγ³γγ«γΌγΊζ¨ͺζ΅ ζ³γΏγͺγΏεΊ
1 year tune up for the car. Time flies. -
by JamesSeeing that Basecamp is shutting down their famous Signal vs Noise blog, I canβt help but wonder how much was the faff of dealing with Wordpress.
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Checkin to Ootoya (倧ζΈε±)
Too much chicken...Karaage Teishoku. The cumin in the spice blend is fantastic. -
First Days with Tanzawa
by JamesThis was my first week using Tanzawa to power my actual blog and not just the dev blog. So far it's been great. I love how easy it is to post. I love that my site is IndieWeb native. I love that my site's stability has improved because I no longer require a database server. And I love that it's using fewer resources. It's great.
This said, there's been a few rough edges that need polishing. Approving 50 some-odd webmentions after OwnYourSwarm started importing un-sent checkins required 50 some-odd page loads. Ouch.ΒI'd also like to improve site performance more in respect to images. Currently Tanzawa automatically requests the most efficient image format that your browser supports. Image format selection is all handled by the browser automatically (no Javascript). This alone usually cuts transfer size in half.
While cutting the transfer size in half with a format change is a good start, I still don't need to be serving (at times) 4000px wide images. This is noticeable in streams where posts usually have images ( Checkins etc..) where the text loads instantly, but the progress bar lingers while images load.
Rather, I'm going to change it to serve a resized (max 800px wide? ) image unless the original is specifically requested.
Lastly, I want to start building a list of things that must (not should) be done before I can feel comfortable releasing Tanzawa for others to use and then start working on that list bit-by-bit.
