In a tiny apartment in the Spanish coastal town of El Masnou, just outside of Barcelona, Kris de Decker runs a website completely powered by a small solar panel crammed into the corner of his balcony. With its light blue background and low-res imagery, the site for Low-Tech Magazine is intentionally retro—a callback to blogs and self-hosted sites from the mid-to-late 1990s. Each web page uses only .77 megabytes of data, making it more than 50 percent leaner than the average web page. It is also static, meaning it lives entirely on its locally hosted solar-powered server and as a result is only generated once, requiring less computing power than a dynamic site that generates anew for each visitor. Low-Tech has no ads and doesn’t use cookies. Even if the site were not powered by solar energy, these choices would make it that rare thing: an environmentally friendly web page.
How a warming world is sparking calls for a greener web
By Kevin Lozano