Carbon-neutral web hosting

Those who know me know that I'm not an activist. All things being equal, I would pick the most socially/environmentally conscious option; but all things are rarely equal, and when they're not I'm not particularly likely to go out of my way to promote the environment or feminism or whatever the issue of the day is.

Today, though, I received some good news for a lazy liberal: my web host is now a carbon-neutral company! From their newsletter:

Climate change is an issue that WebHostingBuzz takes very seriously. Whilst we do not want to enter the global political debate about climate change, we do want to help where we can. As a result of this, we have partnered with the International Tree Foundation. Trees take in carbon dioxide and replace it with oxygen during photosynthesis and help maintain a healthy level of these gases in the atmosphere. Our partnership with the ITF means that we are sponsoring a number of worldwide tree planting projects, which offsets the carbon dioxide produced during the generation of electricity used to power our servers. If you'd like to learn more about the ITF or how you can help, please visit http://www.internationaltreefoundation.org.

If you're looking for a good host, I highly recommend them: Web Hosting Buzz. They have plans starting at $3/month [edit: $4/month] for a good amount of space, and their customer service and technical support is really good (very quick response time).

Our wedding website

If there's actually anyone out there reading this, you may be wondering why Nick is kicking my butt at posting lately. The answer is that we finally found a wedding location last weekend and set a date; so I've been busting my butt this week to finish our wedding website so that we can send out our invitations this weekend.

Each invitation comes with a login and password so that families can log in and RSVP online: it saves paper (whoever came up with the idea of 25 little vellum papers and envelopes folded inside other envelopes?), it saves stamps, and it saves time. They can also let us know what guests they plan to bring, and leave us comments (such as "Congratulations!" or "My son is going through an anti-yellow phase so he needs an entrée without anything yellow in it").

The brilliance of keeping all our RSVPs in a database is that—aside from having all the info in one place and not having to keep lists or hang on to a million little response cards—it makes it really easy to pull up some statistics about who's coming and who's RSVP'd. (I always feel stupid saying RSVP'd; I know we use it as a verb in English, but I can't help thinking répondez s'il vous plaît-ed every time I hear it.) I built an extra module for Nick and me to view some basic information about how many people have responded, and to see any comments people have left:

There will also—as soon as I make some phone calls about this—be info on local hotels, group reservations, maps to our house and to the reception location (a cute farmhouse in Bothell), and other useful information. In case you can't tell, I'm kinda proud of it all. Now I just need to send the actual invitations out so that people can start logging in and using the darned thing.