Invite your friends!

I've just added a page that allows you to invite your friends to use the site. On your main friends list page, there is now a link saying "invite friends". Click the link, enter a few email addresses in the form, and we send your friends a simple email saying that you've invited them, with a link to the site.

We don't keep the addresses, so we don't get anything out of this, it's just a convenient way for you to spread the word! Check it out here.

Facebook Group

For those of you who also use Facebook, I've just created a group for Carbon Diet users. Please join up, and invite your friends! I'm working on a facebook application as well, so that you can put your carbon footprint in your profile, but it's fighting about 20 other things for my attention, so it might be a little while before it's up and running.

Group Invitations

I've just uploaded a new feature - group invitations. You can now invite your friends to groups which you are a member of, which should make it easier to network with people. You can also create invitation-only groups, which users can't join unless they are invited by another user. Next up, I'll be adding a more general "invite your friends" option so that you can easily get your friends to use the Carbon Diet!

Funding

How does a project like this get funded? I can fund a couple of months off work to get it going, but where does it go from there? I'd really like to avoid having to advertise on the site, apart from perhaps the odd affiliate link, but if it has to be that way in the end then so be it. Either way, until the site starts getting a lot of traffic, that isn't going to generate any substantial income anyway. How, then, do I carry on hosting and developing the site when my money runs out? It seems to me like there should be someone out there funding innovative approaches to carbon footprint reduction, but I've not found them yet. I'm spending a lot of time on the phone at the moment trying to find out, but if anyone knows any sources of funding for projects such as this one, please let me know...

Notes

I've just added a note function to the site. You can make notes which are attached to particular dates, and which show up on the daily graph, so you can see when you did certain things. For example, if you turn your heating down, you might add a note to remind you when you did it, so that you can see on the graph what difference it makes. You can attach notes to any of your accounts, or generally to your profile as a whole.

Notes brings the cycle of work for version 0.8 to a close, which is a relief for me! This iteration took a little longer than planned, but that's mainly because I kept adding things to it! The main features in the next version will be flights (hopefully), user and group comments, and aggregate statistics for friend lists and groups. Should be fun!

Shiny New Graphics

I've done a few more updates over the last couple of days, mostly on the graphical side of things. The site now looks a little bit slicker, a bit more modern, and should be more accessible to new users with a new login page. Also, the "remember me" button should work now so you won't have to log in every single time.

Signup problem

Many thanks to Felicity, who pointed out that the signup code was broken and that nobody could create new accounts! I think this was a problem that crept in when I upgraded to a new version of Rails on Wednesday, so if you've tried to create an account and failed, please try again because it's fixed now!

Todays updates

More updates today for your delectation. Nothing huge, but a bunch of little things. Various pages now display a yearly tonnage for your emissions, and now you can enter the number of people in your household to work out the share of that per person. A problem with the action page display in Internet Explorer has been fixed, so everyone using IE should now be able to see what actions they can take. There are a whole load of minor graphical/textual tweaks as well.

Oh, and I added fun transitions to the graphs, simply because they were fun and made it look more interesting :)

Public Profile, Friends, and Groups

I've just uploaded a whiole bucketload of new features for you to play with. It's taken me a few days (hence the lack of blog updates), but now you can make your profile public, so that others can see it and compare themselves to you. You can add people to your friends list so you can keep track of them, and you can create and join groups, organised around any theme you like.

As an example, and to get you started, here is a link to my profile.

Privacy policy change

This week I'm finally working on the social aspect of the Carbon Diet site. Testers will see a new "public" option on their settings page, and a "search" link which will let them search for public profiles. However, because I've now got down to the practicalities of implementing and using this system, I need to make a small change to the privacy policy. The old "public profiles" section said:

If you make your profile 'public', your emissions data will be visible to anyone who visits the site, but we will not make any personally-identifiable information (name, email address, etc.) visible to any other user of the site unless you explicitly allow us to (mainly in the case of adding 'friends' on the site who can see your personal data).

The new one now says:

If you make your profile 'public', your 'display name', country, and emissions data will be visible to anyone who visits the site. However, we will not make any contact information (email address, website, etc.) visible to any other user of the site unless you explicitly tell us to (mainly in the case of adding 'friends' on the site who can see your personal data).

I need to make the display name and country public simply because at least a bit of information is needed in order to be able to find someone's profile. However, you set your own display name, so you can use an alias or even leave it blank if you want to, so this shouldn't cause any problems. If anyone does have any comments on this, please leave them below or on the forum.

Major change to usernames

At the suggestion of a number of people, I've made a pretty major change today to the way that the login system works. Rather than requiring an email address, it now lets you sign up with a username instead. That way, you don't have to give us your email address unless you want to, once your account is created. It should reduce the signup barriers and improve privacy for users, both of which are good things. It also helps with some of the other stuff I will be doing this week.

If you already have a Carbon Diet account, when you next log in (using your email address) you will be prompted to choose a username to identify yourself. Once you've done that, you should use that username to log in from that time onwards.