
Ask HN: Do You Want to Use Your Skills to Save Rainforests? - fend
I&#x27;ve seen quite a few posts on HN where people are asking what they can do to help the environment. One short answer is : donate to an organisation that purchases rainforests for conservation. David Attenborough said : &quot;...it has more effect than almost anything I can think of&quot;<p>Why? Because keeping rainforests intact not only protects the plants and animals within them but also sequesters carbon, regulates the climate and produces the air we breathe. There is no technological replacement for the multifunctional complexity of rainforests.<p>Another thing you could do is volunteer your coding skills and join our non-profit &quot;Fend&quot;. We are taking land acquisition conservation to the masses by building an interactive site where visitors can purchase half acre blocks of rainforest. For every patch they purchase, they can zoom into our front page, choose a block to turn it green, and post their action on social media. Our goal is to turn the whole front page green, which is where we can leverage media&#x2F;following interest.<p>Right now we need developers to help with all aspects of the build. Our most pressing challenge is implementation of the &quot;block picking&quot; functionality on the front page and how to load millions of blocks&#x2F;cells in the canvas while maintaining a snappy to navigate browser experience. The second challenge will be taking a custom snap shot of the page that highlights the user&#x27;s block&#x2F;s, and then making it easy for them to get their snap shot onto their social media.<p>Can you help?<p>If so get in touch : info@fend.earth<p>(Download the PDF on fend.earth for further information)
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oftenwrong
A bit of advice: don't put up barriers.

1\. Take all the information in the PDF, and put it directly on the website.
One click will see less drop-off than two.

2\. Add links to your site on all social media posts. An HN user would have to
copy-and-paste or type your domain name. Make it easy, like so:

[https://fend.earth/](https://fend.earth/)

Anybody that has done A/B testing for click-throughs and "engagement" and such
knows these "minor" things matter a lot.

With regard to to loading and painting many, many cells in the browser: don't.
Compress them into a quadtree. This assumes that acres are stored in a grid,
as they appear to be in the mockups.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree)

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SamBam
I'm always interested in opportunities like this, so will look more deeply
into it. One thing right off the bat, though: you don't have nearly enough
info on your site about who you are. If you want serious volunteers, you need
to show that you're serious too.

Also, your PDF is 10MB. Chrome has a very hard time displaying it. I just
thought the pdf was broken at first. You should fix that.

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fend
Points taken. Both will be addressed.

Happy to talk if you want specific info.

