February 2, 2010

The One Less Flight website has been released

Miskeeto, a world-class user experience strategy and evaluation consultancy led by Robert Hoekman, Jr. recently released the web site One Less Flight (OLF). We designed and developed OLF based on Robert's concept of getting companies and individuals to commit to reducing carbon emissions by taking one less flight each year. The concept was to offer badges/banners for people to put on their web site to show their commitment to the cause. By adding the badge to a web site the domain of that web site would appear on the OLF web site to feature the commitment.

I looked into a few ways of making the domain addition work; trackbacks, pingbacks and refbacks. I ended up choosing refbacks because pingbacks and trackbacks are limited to working only with other trackback-enabled or pingback-enabled web sites, which essentially limited the site to working with other blogs. On the other hand, the refback method allows anyone to use a badge on their site and automatically appear on OLF regardless of how their site is set up.

The custom refback method works through the actual image request. The image request goes through php, which does the following:

1. It verifies that the domain has not already been added to a list of linked domains.
2. It adds it to the list if it does not already exist.
3. It then returns the image based on the banner requested.
4. When someone comes to OLF the list is read and the domains are displayed.

Here's the result: One Less Flight

Special thanks to Stephanie Sullivan for her beautiful CSS coding of my original design!