Green Blog has been around for years. In fact, we’ve been red and green since early 2007. That’s nearly seven years now. For me, it feels like 2007 was just the other day. Time really does go by fast when you’re having fun. But, if you’re been with us since the launch back in 2007, you know the road has been bumpy – to say the least.
The site has undergone several large re-designs, usually one every year. And along the way Green Blog have switched focus – from being a green news aggregator, to a blog that mainly covered environmentally friendly webhosts, energy efficient server technologies and solutions to the Green Blog of today that covers a wide range of environmental topics. And now, Green Blog is about to switch focus again.
Today we unveil the new Green Blog website.
The new Green Blog has a large focus on you, our reader. Green Blog is no longer just a blog – it’s a community. You will, of course, still get the latest environment news on our frontpage from authors around the world. But now, on the new Green Blog you can also discuss topics that are important to you in our environment forums and create your very own green blog.
Registration is free and you can sign up in seconds with your Google, Twitter or Facebook account. If you register now, you will gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to create topics, post replies to existing threads, give reputation to your fellow members, get your own private messenger, post status updates, manage your profile and so much more.
To be honest, I can’t really understand why you are still browsing Green Blog as a regular guest reader…
All this might sounds breathtakingly amazing. But it was not an easy decision to make this move.
To be able to create the new Green Blog we had to move to a completely new publishing system. You can think of it in terms of moving to a new house, which is located in another country with a different language and culture.
We used the very popular blogging platform Wordpress to run the old Green Blog. There is a reason for why Wordpress is number one on the web – it’s a great blogging tool! Unfortunately it isn’t that great when you also want to run a community. And in recent months, as you might have noticed, we haven’t updated Green Blog with new articles. I’ll be honest. At times it has been very quiet here. In part that is due to real life getting in the way. But more, the lack of updates can be blamed on severe technical difficulties with Wordpress.
For the past months we have been unable to properly manage Green Blog. Every time we tried to publish a new article the website have crashed. It didn’t matter how long – or short – it was. Once we pressed on that publish button our server came crashing down. A lot of time have been spent on pinpointing the cause of this error. We have tried to completely overhaul our website in a fruitless attempt to reduce server load. We have switched to new webhosts, upgraded to faster and faster servers. All this made some progress – but far from enough. That is when we decided to move away from Wordpress and instead use the IPS Community Suite - the system which our new Green Blog runs on.
Those server errors we experienced on Wordpress made the decision even more pressing – and easer to make. The transition to our new Green Blog isn’t finished yet – a lot of work remains. For example, most of our links are now broken. And hundreds upon hundreds of our articles need to be properly updated to the new system.
But despite all this, I still think it was the right decision to make all these new and drastic changes to Green Blog. This new publishing system will allow us to take Green Blog to the next level, so to speak.
Change is good, but it can also be difficult. So please, have patience while we transition to this new system (you can ). And while you wait, why not sign up for a free Green Blog account!?
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