SPAM – Graham Chastney

Christmas is a time for saying thank you, so I’d like to say just that to the people who make the WordPress Plug-ins available for use that make this site what it is.

This is the list of plug-ins I’m currently using on this site:

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget

I use this to add the various icons for sharing onto the bottom of posts and in the sidebar.

It also provides some tracking analytics for people who use it.

By The AddThis Team – Visit plugin site

Akismet

The must-have plug-in for comment spam. I’m sure this site is like many that gets a regular intake.

It’s seldom wrong at picking out the rubbish.

By Automattic – Visit plugin site

All in One SEO Pack

My preferred Search Engine Optimisation tool. I’m not that fixated with SEO but as over 40% of the visitors to this site come via search it’s important enough to care about.

By Michael Torbert - Visit plugin site

DandyID Services

I do more than blog – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. all feature in my online experience. DandyID is a great tool for creating an single point of reference for all of my presences. This plug-in makes all of those presences visible on this site.

By Neil Simon, Sara Czyzewicz, Arron Kallenberg, Dan Perron, Anthony Dimitre - Visit plugin site

FD Feedburner Plugin

I use Feedburner (now Google product) to provide the best possible feed to people that I can. Feedburner did seem to be in a bit of hiatus, but it seems to be picking up now.

This little plug-in redirects everyone to Feedburner for me, it’s one of those that you install and forget about.

It also provides another point for analytics, something that you’re never short of in the blogging world I find.

By John Watson | Visit plugin site

Flickr Photo Album

I am a big fan of Flickr and like to show off my photos on this site too. This plug-in makes everything I put onto Flickr available here too.

By Joe Tan – Visit plugin site

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics gives great insights into the what, where, who of a site. This plug-in sends all of the data from this site over to them.

By Joost de Valk – Visit plugin site

Google XML Sitemaps

Another way of making sure that you get visitors from search engines is to give them a good sitemap in the standard XML format. This plug-in creates a sitemap for me, again another set and forget plug-in.

By Arne Brachhold – Visit plugin site

MaxBlogPress Favicon

The natty little icon that you get in the browser for this site comes via this plug-in. It does a really simple thing, that’s nearly as easily done by copying a file to the right place. This is just that little bit easier.

By MaxBlogPress – Visit plugin site

Post-Plugin Library

This is a plug-in library used by a couple of the other plug-ins.

By Rob Marsh, SJ – Visit plugin site

Secure WordPress

Security is a big thing for a site that’s out there in the scary world of the internet. This is one of a couple of security plug-ins that I use, as well as some manual hardening of the site.

By jremillard – Visit plugin site

WordPress.com Stats

I’m a bit of an analytics and statistics junky. The WordPress.com stats are great to see in your dashboard. They also provide some things in a better way than Google Analytics

By Automattic – Visit plugin site

WP Security Scan

Another security tool that I use to keep this site nice and secure. I use more than one because they secure different things

By Michael Torbert – Visit plugin site

WP Super Cache

Assuming that one day this site gets inundated by a referral from a much bigger site and the traffic starts to spike this plug-in ensures that people read a cached copy of the information rather than read it out of the database each time. t’s never actually happened to me, but I’m being prepared.

By Donncha O Caoimh – Visit plugin site

Thank you everyone.

I have always been intrigued with the Carbon footprint of the IT culture that we are building. I have found that people make the assumption that things that are free, are also free in environmental terms too. This is clearly illogical, but people somehow miss that connection.

McAfee have recently undertaken a study that highlights the massive overhead, in CO2 terms, of SPAM:

The average business email user is responsible for
131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions,
and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related. This
spam energy is equivalent to the emissions that
would result if every business email user burned
an extra 3.3 gallons of gasoline annually.

The energy required annually to create, send,
receive, store and view spam adds up to more
than 33 billion kWh, approximately equivalent to
four gigawatts of baseload power generation or
the power provided by four large new coal power
plants. ICF estimates spam-related emissions for all
email users at an annual total of 17 million metric
tons of CO2 or 0.2 percent of the total global CO2
emissions — a number equivalent to emissions
from approximately 1.5 million U.S. homes.

The scary part of this report is the thought that 52% of all of this energy usage is consumed by end users viewing and deleting SPAM.

I’m sure that most people regard SPAM as a nuisance, but I don’t think that many people regard it as a ecological pest also.

Tag: SPAM

SPAM – how much CO2?