If you run a blog or a website you probably know what a robots.txt file is, so you can skip the next line. It’s a small text file that tells search engine what to include and not to include in their indexing of your site.

As you might have noticed or read www.whitehouse.gov has been given an Obama make-over. The changes has aren’t just graphical and textual. Perhaps as a comparison to the previous government, the new robots.txt is a bit more welcoming.

This is Obama’s robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

Yes that’s it!

Now compare it to George W. Bush’s 2400 line robots.txt (I won’t post it all)

1. User-agent:     *
2. Disallow:       /cgi-bin
3. Disallow:       /search
4. Disallow:       /query.html
5. Disallow:       /omb/search
6. Disallow:       /omb/query.html
7. Disallow:       /expectmore/search
8. Disallow:       /expectmore/query.html
9. Disallow:       /results/search
10. Disallow:       /results/query.html
11. Disallow:       /earmarks/search
12. Disallow:       /earmarks/query.html
13. Disallow:       /help
14. Disallow:       /360pics/text
15. Disallow:       /911/911day/text
16. Disallow:       /911/heroes/text
17. Disallow:       /911/messages/text
18. Disallow:       /911/patriotism/text
19. Disallow:       /911/patriotism2/text

Let’s hope Obama keeps it this way. It’s a good start. So American…please don’t screw this up

Have you ever wondered how much your energy your website consumes? How much solar potential your roof has? Where can I buy “green” products? The sites I’ve found all, of course, all in beta.

I’ve previously written about green gadgets, such as cell phones, Roadster and notebooks, so in this post I’ll focus on websites that will help you go green.

We all know that green is the new black. Many companies adopt a green strategy and  green IT is very hot and hyped in the IT business.

But did you ever consider, that everytime you get a visitor on your website or blog, energy is consumed (some might say wasted).

1. CO2Stats.com is here to change that. CO2Stats.com measure how many visitors you have, and purchase renewable energy accordingly. It’s free for the first 100 page views per month.
2. Greenseng.com is a green search engine built on Google Custom Search. So it’s actually Google on renewable energy bought from CO2Stats.com.
3. How much power can a solar array on your roof draw? Find out with Roofray.com. Using Google Maps you locate your house, draw the solar array on the roof and your solar potential is calculated.
4. The daily green will help you with tips, recipes and ideas of how to live green. Great tips like “Saving money on gas”, “7 easy ways to save energy” and ” Safe baby bottles”.
5. With all the money you’ve saved after going green, why not buy green products? EVO is an online green marketplace, with over 100,000 certified consumer products. Certified means, EVO are the ones that certifies them. I’m not sure what their criteria is. EVO will plant a tree for every registered user.

Which website is your favourite green website? What are you doing to conserve energy? Would you add your site to CO2Stats.com?