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A Greener Jobsite

Sharing green jobs is our mission but we also want to be green in the way we do it… We consider our IT jobs here at Green Job Feed to be sustainable even though we aren’t producing energy from the sun or wind as many of our partners do. However, by reducing electrical use, investing in cleantech, and saving paper we are taking every opportunity we can to lessen our impact on the environment and we invite you to learn more about it’s being done.

Consider this, the web is one of the most efficient ways to spread information about jobs. Utilizing web 2.0 techniques and beyond, we are able to reach a larger number of applicants all across the world while targeting better and reducing redundancy and waste as compared to newspapers, magazines, commercials or other traditional media. Just using the internet to post green jobs verses a paper medium is a good start but it doesn’t have to stop there. There are a number of things that can be done to a website in order to reduce the electrical use and paper consumption it requires from users.

First of all, Green Job Feed is proud to be Carbon Neutral! It’s a title we’ve held for over a year now along with our network of cleantech sites (http://cleantechauthority.com). By utilizing carbon credits to plant new trees and invest in wind and solar prjects around the world, Green Job Feed has more than offset the CO2 created by the electricity running our servers and office utilities.

Things get a little less clear when you consider the electrical use of our customers’ and visitors’ computers, but we’ve taken that into consideration in the way we’ve designed the code on our pages. They are all fast loading and optimized with smaller images and scripts to save load requirements. This adds up to a better user experience as well as electricity savings because computers don’t have to process as much.

In addition to carbon credits and coding efficiency, the most important ingredient in making http://greenjobfeed.com one of the most environmentally friendly jobsites on the web is how it prints. Did you know that websites can include special instructions that tell printers how to behave. Optimizing what to print, what to ignore, and how much space to leave around objects can add up to significant paper savings.

In most cases a website can easily half the number of pieces of paper a user needs to print because even one extra line can spill over and thus require two sheets instead of just one! All things considered, this is one of the best ways for a website to reduce the impact they have on the environment and ultimately save a lot of trees, ink, toner and bleaching chemicals (used to create the white printing paper) from going to waste. Paper isn’t exactly light either, printing less means buying less and that means less has to be shipped around the world and that saves gas and electricity.

In the example images below we show how two versions of our site differe when being printed. The one on the left doesn’t include any special instructions on how to print and thus looks wrather sloppy and takes up extra room. On the right part of the images the same page is being printed and a file called print.css is being called on in the header of our site documents. The print CSS file tells the printer to ignore many of the forms and fields that wouldn’t be necessary for a home user who is printing the site. This technique goes a long way in saving paper but it can also be about design and having fun. Notice that in the print friendly version of our site we programmed in a black Green Job Feed logo in the upper left side of the page.

If you want to make your own print.css use the snippet of code below and set it to a print.css file on your own site. Next, go through your site html code and identify any elements you don’t need to have printed. Include these “extra” classes and ID’s in the lines of your print CSS and use the display:none attribute to keep them from printing. You can also change the width, height, and other elements of the page to better utilize your paper real estate. You can view our actual print.css file here. You can test our print.css file by visiting any of the pages at http://greenjobfeed.com and clicking file » print » print preview.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="http://yoursite.com/path/to/your/print.css" />