environmental ideas

Create a WWF Web Page to Help Spread Your Environmental Message

jplatt — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Looking for a way to talk about your environmental passions online, and maybe raise some money in the process? The World Wildlife Fund has a new program called Panda Pages to help you do just that. With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can quickly and easily create a free, customized web page that spreads your green messages, be they about a specific event, a special location, an endangered animal, or just about anything else.

You can also use the page to raise funds for the WWF. A simple interface allows you to email your friends and family about your site, and you can set a fundraising goal for your efforts.

You can also create a guest book so people can comment on your site and you can make connections with other, like-minded green folks.

I've given this a try, and while the pages you can create aren't totally flexible, you do have a lot of room to play with to customize your content and your message. The "tell a friend" and fund-raising tools are easy to use, too. In less than ten minutes, you can have a web page up and running and a fund-raising campaign on its way.

You can check out my own Panda Page here. And if you create your own Panda Page, post the address here in the comments!

Web Browser Gives Back to Green Causes

jplatt — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:00:00 -0400

More than 50% of web surfers today use a version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Another 40% use Mozilla Firefox. But did you know that there are other alternatives -- and that one of them is greener than all the rest?

Flock Eco is a green-minded version of the new Flock web browser. Like its base edition, Flock Eco is billed as a "social web browser." Instead of having a traditional "home page," the Flock browser pulls in content from your friends and your favorite news sites. You can use it to automatically follow people on Fickr, Twitter and Facebook, and to get the RSS feeds you want.

The Flock Eco version is perfectly built for greenies like you and me. It comes with feeds from Grist, Treehugger, Planetgreen and others built right in. The browser is like a one-stop-shop for environmental news and content. It also comes with tools for green blogging.

Plus, Flock Eco has a built-in search engine (powered by Yahoo), and Flock gives back 10% of its proceeds from every search to environmental causes -- causes which will be chosed each year by its users.

Flock is free, and a worthy alternative to something that you use all the time anyway.

Save Paper. Save Trees -- Try Digital Magazines

jplatt — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

We get a lot of magazines in the Platt household. We love every one of them, but boy do they pile up quickly. And man, do they use a lot of paper.

Which is why I recently gave Zinio a try. This new service (currently in beta version) delivers digital versions of more than 350 different consumer magazines. You can subscribe or buy individual issues -- including recent back issues -- which you can read online, download to your PC, or even read on your mobile device.

I started with a few free sample issues, and was quickly impressed. The digital versions are exactly the same as their printed counterparts, only paperless. They carry the exact same articles and artwork, in the same layouts, but with added navigation tools and the ability to increase the viewing size of any page up to 400%.

The online versions also come with an abundance of hyperlinks, making it easier to explore the web when a link is included in an article or advertisement. All in all, it's a pretty good experience.

I did have a few problems with the Zinio versions. For one thing, they exaclty reproduce the layout of the printed magazines. This required me to scroll up and down columns, and from one column to the next, in order to actually read any of the articles. That's too much for my poor carpal-tunnel addled wrists.

The Zinio versions are also priced the same as the printed magazines. Since the publishers don't incur printing or shipping costs, I would have expected the prices to be lower. Maybe that will come as Zinio hits some economies of scale.

Still, despite my reservations, Zinio magazines aren't printed on paper, and they aren't shipped from one corner of the globe to another. They don't include non-recyclable cologne inserts, and they don't come in annoying plastic polybags. Any magazines you buy are archived online, so you don't need to keep paper versions lying around, and there's nothing to recycle.

If you're a magazine junkie like me, but have been worrying about the environmental impact of your monthly fix, this could be the solution you've been looking for. Give it a try.