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With bucky I want to focus more on sustainable design.

I am interested in how to apply that to digital and physical products, since I work on combinations of the two.

In that light, something as simple as my new website needs a rethink.

It turns out that the internet is a large contributor to green house gas emissions, and that will only increase with more content consumption and the running of AI in the cloud.

For a website, it matters a lot what kind of tech stack you use. Low level languages (C, Go, Rust etc) have the least impact, while higher level languages (eg Python) have the highest impact. JavaScript is in the middle.

It would be very easy to just pick a platform and set up a CMS based on Javascript or Python. But I will not write enough posts to warrant a CMS that runs a lot of overhead. Traffic will be low, so it just needs to have minimal impact in idle mode.

So I am just making a static html/css webpage, just like in the old days. CSS has a lot of interesting features now, so it's not as limiting as it used to be. The spinning 3d tetrahedron is a fun exercise in using css animations, for example.



This website is now self-hosted on a small server at Hetzner, a German hosting provider, and two things drew me there.

The first is data sovereignty. Hetzner is German-owned with data centres in Germany and Finland, so everything stays under EU jurisdiction and outside the reach of US laws like the CLOUD Act. My data can be requested, but only through European channels.

The second is sustainability. Their German data centres run on 100% hydropower, operate at a remarkably low PUE of around 1.13, carry the EU's EMAS eco-management certification, and they extend hardware lifecycles by refurbishing and reselling old servers rather than scrapping them.

I run it all myself with Coolify, an open-source platform that handles deploys and SSL, which keeps the whole stack lean and in my own hands.

The website has an A+ rating on websitecarbon.com. Only 0.02 g of CO2 is produced for every page view.

If you want to know a lot more about sustainable web design, check out sustainablewebdesign.org.

For now, I am going to keep it simple and see what happens when it develops and grows.

If I need to build a complex web app anytime soon, that might be a good excuse for me to pick up Rust...