I thought about creating "the" green website for Edmonton for years before I actually did it. When I first started moving towards environmental activism, I felt quite isolated. It was difficult to meet like-minded people, and while there were a few websites here and there for local green groups, they generally weren't relevant or recently-updated.

When my employer gave me a year off to take a Master's in Information Systems,  I thought that I would have even less time to work on a green website for Edmonton. When it came time to choose whether to take a project-based or an essay-based route, though, the idea dawned on me that I could kill two birds with one stone.

Master's Project

In my mind, a crucial component to Green Edmonton has always been a web front end for Michael Kalmanovitch's Activist Agenda newsletter. He and his store, Earth's General Store, have been the heart of Edmonton's environmental community for the past 15 years or so. He had been gathering details about different events and information from people via email, and collating them together into the Activist Agenda using cut and paste. I saw this as a waste of his valuable time - time that he could be spending on any of the other valuable projects that he has going.

The other component was community blogging. I was inspired by treehugging.com's collaborative blogging efforts, which is very effective because 15 people writing about a topic make it worth visiting the website every day. I envisioned green-minded Edmontonian's sharing their knowledge about how to live green here.

So I decided to build a custom event and information entry, email and display system to automate the Activist Agenda. I wanted to build it in Java because it's the computer language that I use primarily at work, and I wanted to try out some new techniques that I had read about. 

For the blogging component, though, I didn’t need to write customized software. There are many excellent open source software systems, called Content Management Systems (CMSs), which have built in blogging functionality. The problem is, the best of these systems are written in PHP, a programming language that’s very popular with the open source programming community.

So what is a Java geek to do? I wanted to leverage the available PHP-based software and Java at the same time. Realizing that the same problem exists in large organizations as well (Java programmers are much more common than PHP programmers), I decided to write a master’s thesis on how to go about integrating PHP and Java. I had an interesting Master’s thesis topic, and I would get to build Green Edmonton at the same time. Perfect.

The resulting Master's paper is here (trust me, unless your boss has just told you to integrate a Java system with a PHP system, you don't want to read it).  Anyway, that's partly how Green Edmonton came about. In my next post, I'll talk about the new, greener web server and how many monthly visitors the website is getting.