Land Acknowledgement

This website was served to your device from a Raspberry Pi 5 (pictured below) located in an apartment that was built on top of the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Anishnabeg, and the Mississaugas of the Credit peoples. It relies on about 8-12 watts of energy from the earth. Its domain name was purchased from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, and its network security was provided by Cloudflare. Both of these companies draw resources from the earth to run data centres and provide their services.

Tips for Creating a Website While Respecting the Land It’s Built On Top Of

Try to host the site on your own computer, preferably one with a low power draw

• You can use:
• Your desktop computer (not recommended, sucks up a lot of power)
• A small and cheap single-board computer (probably the easiest way to keep your power draw low)
• An old laptop or Android phone rotting in a cupboard (cuts down on e-waste, but don’t forget to remove the battery!)
• This is probably the hardest step, it requires some knowledge of the command-line and server maintenance

Detach yourself from large companies and massive data centres (as much as is possible)

• This is an extension of the above point, but it bears repeating
• Don’t host your videos on YouTube, don’t host your images on Imgur, etc.
• You probably won’t be able to fully detach yourself from companies
• To get a domain name, you need to rent it from a company
• You are going to want to use a web security provider like Cloudflare, or your Wi-Fi connection is going to be bombarded by hackers
• However, you should still try to avoid relying on specific companies/services

Keep your file size low

• If your website is large, your visitors will have to download more data, which means they’ll use up more power
• Images and videos have the biggest impact on file size, so be sure to compress them before downloading!
• The rule below will likely also help with this!

Only use what is actually necessary

• Think about the plugins and addons you’re using to code your website
• Do you really need React or p5.js to do what you want to do?
• Do you even need JavaScript?
• Using a bunch of unnecessary frameworks and plugins bloats your file size, forcing your visitors to download more

Make sure your site is fast on slow computers

• The internet is the number one cause of e-waste
• As the net evolves, old devices stop receiving updates and can no longer render websites that use new web technologies
• As a result, they get thrown into landfills
• Test your website on the slowest, oldest computer you have
• Try to avoid using newer JavaScript or CSS unless you need to