HN a Green Certified Site?

by fnid on 10/8/2009, 4:29 PM with 2 comments

I have noticed a few times that when I open many comments at HN in new tabs, they blink. This tells me they are auto refreshing or making some sort of http call to another site.

I don't like when sites do this. It makes me paranoid and wonder why does this fairly static page need to make multiple requests over time to the web?

So I investigated and went first to the source and found a script tag to co2stats.com. I looked at the source for the script and found this:

   setInterval("co2stats_upd()",300000);
co2stats_upd reloads an image with some parameters to do tracking, or whatever else.

Is this really greener? Can the institution of another system with webservers and a data center really make HN greener? Wouldn't it be greener to not automatically refresh data coming from another server?

All I can wonder is, "Is this for real?"

  • by ErrantX on 10/8/2009, 5:03 PM

    If you read the site basically the Co2stats thing is a subscription service that buys carbon certificates using a portion of your subscription.

    So I guess there is the green aspect :)

    Whether that makes HN (or any other site using) it "green" is another matter. I suppose it is having some form of effect.... just not in any readily visible way.

    If a million sites did it then there might be an appreciable affect.

  • by gcb on 10/8/2009, 5:53 PM

    the word green today means tax exempt.

    period.