Will Barton

It’s been a hot minute since I checked in on the W3C’s web sustainability work. I briefly joined the working group before other events interfered with my professional life. Given that big tech has thrown their sustainability goals out the window, I want to do what little I can in my little corner of the internet. So I went back down the sustainability rabbit hole to see if I can estimate what this website emits and how I can make improvements.

I got to a place where I could calculate this site’s emissions at an average of 0.11g CO₂e per page. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, because my photo galleries pages a lot heavier (more and bigger images). The pages under /photography are 0.15g CO₂e on average, but the “heaviest” is 1.454g CO₂e.

So, I want to go through how do we get to those numbers, because there are a couple different sites to check that don’t tell you a whole lot. I also want to how to reason about them, how to make sense across a site and particular pages.

During a talk that I gave at Wagtail Space 2024 with my colleague Chuck Sebian-Lander, Auditing Wagtail Content (slides), I introduced a library we had worked on to help us audit. It walks through StreamFields to construct Django QuerySet-like objects specifically for understanding the shape of the content you have. But two functions in that library are super useful outside the audit context, so I’ve broken them out into their own library, wagtail-traverse.

At this year’s Wagtail Space US, a conference dedicated to the Wagtail content management system, my friend Tim Allen hosted a panel on (Wagtail) packages, the challenges of maintaining them, and the small joys of being a maintainer. It was a good discussion, and you should watch the full panel if you’re interested (once it’s posted). I have some reflections on I wanted to write up coming out of it.