Webware

Homeowners who dream of their electric meter spinning backward may seek solar panels to slash bills and carbon emissions. But where to start?

Before you call a contractor, these sites can assist with the early steps, like summing up what you could spend or save in your neighborhood.

The pioneering San Francisco Solar Map offers personalized evaluations.

San Francisco Solar Map

The San Francisco Solar Map helps locals lay their solar plans. A Google map pegs projects already up and running. Type in your address for estimates of installation fees and long-term utility bill savings and to find installers listed by the California Energy Commission.

Fog City's municipal rebates, added to state and federal incentives, probably make it the least expensive place for homeowners and businesses to add photovoltaics. Residents taking advantage of all discounts might drop the hardware and construction costs from, say, $25,000 to $7,000. The Web site supports Mayor Gavin Newsom's goal of 10,000 solar rooftops by 2012. It's the work of the San Francisco Department of the Environment and CH2M Hill, a consulting firm.

Solar Boston's map displays the solar potential for an address or even a city block.

Solar Boston

Mayor Thomas Menino's Solar Boston project aims to ramp up installations from half a megawatt to 25 megawatts by 2015. Its Flash-based map tracks solar, wind, biomass, and hydropower sources around town. You can enter an address, select a building, or even highlight an area on the map, to view the potential in dollars and kilowatts for topping roofs with photovoltaics.

Both San Francisco and Boston belong to the Department of Energy's Solar America Cities initiative to fast-track the spread of solar power. The two cities' maps are early, model tools. I'd also like to see peer comments and Yelp-like ratings of services and products. And I'd expect such services to help consumers share tips and report about the longest-lasting equipment as the solar sector matures. For instance, I found more than three dozen installers within 30 miles of my San Francisco apartment, but I'd have to do research elsewhere to decide whom to trust.

How do solar panels affect a home's resale value? Somebody should integrate solar maps with real estate listings, in the style of Trulia or Zillow.

Cooler Planet's maps include regional incentives around the country to estimate solar costs and savings.

Cooler Planet

Cooler Planet's solar maps cover territory from coast to coast. Google Maps mashups from the Seattle environmental marketing firm chart solar rebates, existing installations, costs and savings, and installers around the country. We learned that photovoltaic panels atop a three-flat in Chicago, where only federal incentives are available, could halve the $300 monthly electric bill and pay for themselves after 28 years.

Cooler Planet also rates solar incentives by state, painting Louisiana and Oregon as surprisingly bright. Another map tracks the growth of solar in California since 1999.

Choose your building, and Sungevity will create an estimate of its solar potential.

Sungevity

Sungevity asks you to pick your San Francisco Bay-area building on a map and describe the roofing material in exchange for an e-mail quote of solar costs. Technology from Microsoft Virtual Earth enables the company to take into account the angle of a roof, which affects the light available to solar panels throughout the day. That could lead to fewer measurements in person, saving time and money.

RoofRay relies on your rooftop drawing to figure a slanted roof into its cost estimates.

RoofRay

RoofRay also looks at the slant of a roof, although with less precision than Sungevity. Locate your building on a Google Map, draw an outline of the roof, and estimate the pitch. RoofRay asks for your average monthly electric bill, then spells out a detailed financial analysis. The site requires registration and asks for snail mail and e-mail addresses with a phone number. To put an interactive RoofRay widget on a blog, code is available for a quick cut-and-paste.

This rapidly-growing grassroots effort aims to get more than One Block off the Grid.

1BOG

San Franciscans Sylvia Ventura and Dan Barahona launched One Block Off the Grid in June to help bring cheaper solar power to the people. The effort organizes homeowners to bargain together with businesses to drive down the costs of installation. Several dozen people who joined the first campaign enjoyed savings of up to 40 percent, according to 1BOG.

Last week, the couple sold their nonprofit to Virgance, a social media and activism start-up. The 1,153-member solar effort has spread to 20 cities. It's even taking a stab at solar agreements between tenants and landlords. Neighborhood Solar is a similar grassroots purchasing program in Denver, where 1BOG is establishing a toehold.

Wattbot's recommendations of cleaner energy technologies are set to launch in January.

Wattbot

Wattbot, which remains in preview testing, promises custom evaluations in January to help households save money and carbon emissions. Share your address, and it will detail potential energy-efficiency and renewable technologies for your address. More than a solar-referral tool, it will also evaluate the financial impact of modest tweaks, like swapping old lightbulbs with compact fluorescents. You'll be able to contact service providers, take notes on projects, and connect with fellow users.

For now, there's just a simple U.S. heat map of renewable energy adoption. Wattbot is also building a service for clean-tech companies to track sales leads and get market research. The planned features, if realized, could make this site a unique hub in the clean-energy, green-building marketplace.

This post was updated to add a more detailed image of a quote from Sungevity.

This morning simple site builder Synthasite has a new and improved user interface that's different from any other site creation tool I've used. There are still themes to choose from, and widgets to drop in, but the site building tool has received a far more polished feel that I think new users will be a little more comfortable with.

The biggest change users will notice is that the tool now scales to the entire width of your monitor. Everything is still drag and drop, but now each element also includes right click contextual menus to tweak various bits of metadata or options.

Having just looked at Wix a few weeks back, there are definite similarities between the two, although I found Synthasite's theme directory to be more straightforward. There are now 60 different themes to choose from, and most have color pallets that you can pick to further tweak the look of your site.

Also new with this morning's redesign are some widgets you can plug into your page, like a new Flickr gallery builder that will put together a pretty svelte looking photo collection from your Flickr photo stream. Photos uploaded to your Synthasite account can now be edited within the tool using photo editor Picnik.

One thing to note is that the service is not using Amazon's S3 storage service to host the blogs like many other simple site hosts do. Instead it's using its own server farm that's located in the same part of the world. Synthasite's CEO Vinny Lingham tells me that he'd eventually like to move to a hybrid solution using several server solutions at once to make sure sites won't go down even if one server cluster does.

In the coming months the service will be expanding to cover niche sites like resumes, specialty blogs, and portfolio sites.

Synthasite's new page creator is a simple drag-and-drop affair. It'll also scale as wide as your monitor to let you see how your site will look live, as you change it.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Just bought a domain and don't know what to do with it? Maybe you need to set up a blog, or are in the midst of hiring a designer. Don't just let it sit there while you get your act together--get a page to let people know what's going on. A service called LaunchSplash is offering a simple tool that does this for you.

All you have to do to get started is drop in a simple headline and description. The site provides an RSS feed people can subscribe to in order to get updates, or a simple mailing list that you can use to send out a blast when your site goes live.

Mapping the new landing page to your domain is pretty simple--you just plug in a special address provided by LaunchSplash into the management page where you bought the domain. From then on it will send visitors to your landing page instead of a blank "server not found" page. You can also plug in Google Analytics to track how many people are coming to your site before it's even up.

To make its cash the site offers a premium service that gives you more complex control over the page including four extra themes to spice up what people see (note: experts can simply tweak the CSS file).The higher plans also let you ramp up the amount of pages you can have up to 50 sites.

[via SimpleSpark]

Make a landing page for a site you're not ready to launch yet with LaunchSplash.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Remember when you were in junior high and the ultimate way to express yourself was to line the walls of your locker with photos and notes from friends and magazine clippings of every variety? Well, here's the digital-age version. Web page creation veteran Freewebs (more coverage here) has just launched a new site, Pagii (rhymes with "cagey"), which it's calling a "social publishing network." It's a drag-and-drop service that allows you to put photos, text, shapes, videos, and external widgets into a free-form, JavaScript-based page. The end result is something that's essentially a cross between a social networking profile and a standalone Web site. Or, as I like to call it, a locker wall 2.0.

Some Pagii profiles look like fairly standard social networking pages.

(Credit: Pagii)

History lesson for those who came in late: Way, way, way back in the prehistoric days when "social media" meant watching the news at a bar in the company of Guinness-guzzling patrons, it was kind of trendy to have your own Web page--remember Geocities and Angelfire? That stuff tended to actually require (gasp!) a smattering of HTML expertise, and the popularity of the personal Web page gradually waned with the rise of early social networking and blogging entrants like LiveJournal and Friendster. Pagii seems like it's an attempt to revive those days when expressing yourself on the Web was something more customizable than filling out fields to say that you're 5'9", like listening to Arcade Fire, and are interested in "whatever I can get." But since the caveman age of 1999, there have obviously been major developments in user interfaces as well as social networking capabilities. So, not only are Pagii sites relatively easy to throw together and tweak into something rather functional, it's also possible to amass a friends list, interact with other peoples' profiles, and even collaborate with fellow members on a single page.

Another Pagii user has co-opted the service as a sort of art platform.

(Credit: Pagii)

On the positive side, there's some cool stuff you can do with Pagii, especially if you ever wished your Facebook profile were more malleable. There are a number of third-party content launch partners (Miniclip, Pyzam, and the ubiquitous Slide) with promises of more to come. Plus, if you spend a decent amount of time fixing up and customizing your site, you can come up with something rather aesthetically pleasing.

On the negative side, Pagii is a memory hog; it slowed down my Firefox browser on a fairly normal home Internet connection. Additionally, while it's possible to make a Pagii profile look quite pretty, it's also possible to overdose on blingy glitter text and animated shapes in a way that could make the average visitor cringe. Then again, you can do that with just about any social networking site--even the once-minimalist Facebook --these days.

And, finally, social networking is reaching a serious saturation point (if it's not there yet) with recent entrants like Yahoo Mash (coverage here) and Viacom's Flux (coverage here). The saving grace for Pagii could be that Web users--particularly the self-expression junkies who have turned MySpace pages into personal art installations--might be drawn to the fact that you can play around with it without actually needing to use the social features. Nevertheless, we just might not need another way to put your party photos and life aspirations on the Web at this point.

There aren't enough down-to-earth, Web-based tools to help you visualize a greener home. The Green Building Studio is for architects, while Lucid Design Group's energy dashboard is found only in a slim number of buildings. Yahoo's Green House is pretty, yet it can't be personalized.

By contrast, the Department of Energy's frightful Energy Hog.

But I just wasted a fine chunk of the afternoon playing with a kids' Web site that makes a great model for what I'd like to see for adults. My Abodo is an excellent, Flash-based interface that walks you through building a virtual green home. Created in part by the British government, it's more happy-go-lucky than our Department of Energy's Energy Hog games (though not as fun as killing cows in the McDonald's Video Game that it reminded Josh of). My Abodo lets you hand-pick various parts of the house, from the flowery green roof to your own vegetable garden, while adjusting trash in the nearby dump accordingly. When you're done, you can embed your abode on a blog or other Web site, just like so below.

I'm crossing my fingers that someone might offer some freebie to bring green building down to earth for grown-ups. Google Earth (more here) and SketchUp provide so much potential for environmental imaging and modeling. Imagine if the search giant also served up an amateur architecture tool that let you design buildings online from the inside out.

AUSTIN, Texas--You can think of Green Building Studio (GBS) as a mashup between Autodesk and Google.

The Santa Rosa, Calif.-based company makes a computer automated design application for architects and builders that evaluates a building's energy efficiency. And after it does that, it pops up product recommendations for insulation, lighting and other products to increase efficiency. It makes money from the software as well as generating leads for product suppliers.

The company essentially exists to tackle two problems, according to CEO John Kennedy, who spoke at the Clean Energy Venture Summit taking place this week in Austin. First, the company's software encourages the construction of more energy-efficient buildings.

"Buildings are the largest energy users in the U.S. and the world and consequently the largest producers of greenhouse gases," he said. "And the trend is getting worse."

Second, it hopes to make money by helping companies market their products. Building products right now aren't marketed with laser-like efficiency. Approximately $60 billion gets spent a year on marketing them, according to Kennedy.

GBS launched its first version in 2004 and will come out with version three in the fall. Autodesk sells the software through its reseller channel and the two companies have launched a training program to educate 50,000 architects on how to use the software by 2010.

The company also sells private label versions of the software to manufacturers like Owens-Corning, he said.

Green Building Studio is a mashup of various services to help architects build greener buildings.

(Credit: Green Building Studio, Inc.)

From the Web 2.0 Conference:

Instructables is an awesome site of how-to guides. The content seems to be weighted towards clever and geeky projects rather than basic home improvement. While it's easy to find a lesson on how to paint your laptop lid, it's hard to find one on how to paint a room. Still, the design and layout of the lessons--most of which are photo illustrated--are beautiful.

New at Web 2.0: better collaboration features, so you can build lessons, wiki-style, with compatriots instead of building one yourself and relying on the comments to clear up your goofs. This is a great site if you think the 20-page projects in Make require too much commitment. See also: Wikihow.