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Interviewed on Carbon Offsets Daily

originally posted here

Interview: SustainableWebsites on the Soundness of Carbon Offsets to Combat Global Warming

Carbon Offsets Daily: Do you think companies should use carbon offsets to mitigate their global warming emissions?

SustainableWebsites: Yes. The old saying in carpentry is “measure twice, cut once” and I think it applies to offsets too. First, take a baseline measurement of your existing carbon dioxide footprint, and begin offsetting as soon as you can. Then, determine areas where you can cut down on the the actual CO2 produced, so that you can purchase less offsets. The act of purchasing carbon offsets is only the first step towards true sustainability, but it is a very important one because without measurement you don’t know where to start. So, if you can “measure and cut” and then continuously improve, your company will be truly living up to its potential in terms of helping the impact of its activities on global warming. A complete sustainability strategy should also measure and then reduce waste and water usage as well as energy, and include social and labor considerations.

Testing from iphone

Wow, check out the Wordpress app on the iTunes app store!

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brandchannel.com | Sandra Taylor | Sustainable Business International, LLc | brand | brands | branding

brandchannel.com | Sandra Taylor | Sustainable Business International, LLc | brand | brands | branding

Sandra E. Taylor, President and CEO of the new global consulting firm Sustainable Business International, LLC, talks to brandchannel and explains why corporate social responsibility nowadays is not just good for the brand, it’s essential for brand value.

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Unlimited/Oversold hosting and how it’s changing the web hosting industry | The HostReview Blog

Unlimited/Oversold hosting and how it's changing the web hosting industry | The HostReview Blog

Overselling has also distorted customer knowledge of the hosting market and needs-based analysis of hosting plans. Instead of learning to use rational evaluation techniques of each hosting plan under consideration, customers have been “trained” through constant exposure to ads emphasizing high disk space and bandwidth (and little else) to choose the host that offers the most disk space and bandwidth for the least amount of money.
So, what does this mean for the industry? It should be pretty obvious: overselling is not a sustainable practice from a financial standpoint.

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BenCurtis.com » RESTful searching in Rails

BenCurtis.com » RESTful searching in Rails

A really simple implementation of the most basic type of searching you can do in a Rails application. It just so happens that this method will also handle the bulk of your searching needs

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Video: Stabilize Carbon Dioxide at 350 ppm

via WorldChanging:


“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high — that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm,” says Jim Hansen.

Where the Hell is Matt - 2008 version 2

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) on Vimeo - Mozilla Firefox (Build 2008061004).jpg
I love the update to this very popular internet video. It’s so transcendent, and I love that he got to travel the world making people smile and Dance. Thanks to Seguinwoodworks.com’s David Terry for letting me know about it!


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

100% post-consumer recycled paper business cards from Moo.com

via GreenLAGirl.com: Eco-friendly business cards don’t come cheap, she discovered a while back. But just in time for the BlogHer conference later this month, eco-cards have gotten a lot more affordable, with Moo.com entering the eco business card business!

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Rail Spikes: Remote MySQL GUI with SSH

Rail Spikes: Remote MySQL GUI with SSH

How to connect to MySQL on a remote server via ssh

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Robby on Rails : The legacy of databases with Rails

Robby on Rails : The legacy of databases with Rails

How to make a legacy database schema play nicer with rails

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Shifting Careers - Fighting a Workplace War Against Distraction - NYTimes.com

Shifting Careers - Fighting a Workplace War Against Distraction - NYTimes.com

The average knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes, and, once distracted, a worker takes nearly a half-hour to resume the original task, according to Gloria Mark, a leader in the new field of “interruption science.”

The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. The exciting news is that the enigma of attention has just begun to be mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.

Practice may help. Scientists are discovering that attention can be bolstered through training, including meditation. One study, for instance, showed that eight weeks of meditation significantly boosted focus in a group of 17 novices. Six-year-olds given computer-based attention training by the scientist Michael Posner showed a marked gain in executive attention.

TO combat overload, we also need to look to our environments. That’s why a few pioneering companies are creating places or times for uninterrupted, focused creative thought. I.B.M. employees practice “Think Fridays” worldwide, avoiding or cutting back on e-mail, meetings and interruptions. Other firms are setting aside unwired, quiet rooms.

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Migrating from 1.0.x to 1.5 Stable - Joomla! Documentation

Migrating from 1.0.x to 1.5 Stable - Joomla! Documentation

How to Migrate from Joomla 1.0.x to 1.5

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Joomla! Help Site - How to patch Joomla! 1.0.x to 1.0.x

Joomla! Help Site - How to patch Joomla! 1.0.x to 1.0.x

How to patch joomla from 1.0.x to 1.0.x

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Green Gorilla in the Greenhouse

Ross and I have been doing some work for Green Gorilla — continuing to develop Sustainable Websites significant expertise in WordPress and SEO for WordPress. It’s been a pleasure to work with Jay and Reenita — because they both understand that SEO is a creative and technical process — and want to learn more about it, and because they are already on the WordPress system and want to learn more about it, too. I’m finding that our best clients always want to learn more, and are willing to pay for our time and expertise that we’ve accumulated over the years. It’s a whole different dynamic than a client that just says “tell me how much it’s going to cost and all my options - oh and go and do all the research for free”. Anyway - they are doing some great stuff with Environmental Education and it’s definitely worth checking out the show. Worth watching and also worth looking at a wonderfully designed WordPress site.

Gorilla in the Greenhouse is an action-packed, web-based animated show that inspires kids to take real-world steps towards a healthy planet. The show is set in a magical greenhouse in San Francisco, and features a visionary green gorilla and four kids who use their imagination, their network and their music to tackle the environmental challenges facing their generation.

“Kids can save the world,” says Eli Noyes, kid’s TV veteran and director of the show. “This is the kind of show that will travel effortlessly from the TV to the Internet to the real world. It is by nature interactive, because kids can do in the real world what they see our virtual kids doing. And every imaginary character and action in the show has an analogous real life counterpart.”

The pilot episode, entitled The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, follows the kids as they face a demented plot by Dr. Morlon Hufflebot to create an island of plastic bags in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the show, the kids travel to the island to observe the situation, go undercover into the plastic bag factory and then foil the plot though multiple actions. They spread their green message through their social networks, rally cities to ban plastic bags, design a new eco-friendly bag and create awareness through their original song “Bag the Bag (The Gyre Song)”. The next episode planned for later in 2008 will follow the kids through adventures exploring the challenge of energy efficiency.

“When I was a kid, I loved Schoolhouse Rock. The great songs and stories gave us a context for learning how the world worked,” says, Jay Golden, creator of the show. “Gorilla in the Greenhouse is our way of introducing this generation to a world of possibility through story. Instead of ‘put in a new light bulb’, we want to show the most over-the-top environmental scenarios transformed by vision, collaboration and great music. So we decided to start with a huge island of plastic bags.”

The show is a presentation of SustainLane, a green media company based in San Francisco, and created by SustainLane’s VP of New Media, former Free Range Studios and Shockwave.com producer Jay Golden, The show is produced by Ralph Guggenheim, a founding member of Pixar, and producer of Oscar-winning short film “Tin Toy” and the classic animated feature “Toy Story.” Animation, art direction and creative consultation for the show is done by Golden’s former teammates at Free Range Studios, known for its wildly successful, cause-based viral movies such as “The Meatrix”, “Story of Stuff” and “Grocery Store Wars”. Gorilla director Eli Noyes, an academy award nominee, has also directed segments for MTV’s animated showcase “Liquid Television” and Sesame Street’s “Sand Alphabet” and “Mad Painter”.

The show and the curriculum will be broadcast to National Geographic’s platform of over 1 million kids. It is also distributed through the home site www.greengorilla.com.

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Ethilien :: Better Redirects in Rails

Ethilien :: Better Redirects in Rails

some tricks he’s developed for handling a few special types of redirects a bit more gracefully in Ruby on Rails.

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15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages - Six Revisions

15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages - Six Revisions

A few useful, free tools to help you create and sustain high-performance web applications.

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SEO Guide for Designers

SEO Guide for Designers

This is a SEO guide for designers who want to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. Explains the common mistakes made by designers and developers. The article provides some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines.

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SEO Links at Ivan Enviroman

SEO Links at Ivan Enviroman

Keyword Suggestions and Keyword Density checker

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Live PR | Live PageRank Firefox Extension | Check Your PageRank | PageRank Checker

Live PR | Live PageRank Firefox Extension | Check Your PageRank | PageRank Checker

Firefox extension to show Google PageRank for sites you visit

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15 Questions to Ask During a Ruby Interview

When hiring Ruby on Rails programmers, knowing the right questions to ask during an interview was a real challenge for Ryan Sobol of Ritirisi.. In 30 minutes or less, it’s difficult to get a solid read on a candidate’s skill set without looking at code they’ve previously written.

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