Press coverage, and a question

Hello everyone. Firstly, I thought I'd let you know that the Carbon Diet got a little writeup in the CAT newsletter, Clean Slate. I did a talk about it at the members conference in August, and it was one of the ones which got written up in the magazine, so that's nice.

Secondly, I have a question for you all. Since I've been tracking my petrol usage on the Carbon Diet, I have realised that in the last 6 months, I have only used 3 tanks of fuel. The car is a 2-seater, basically just for me, no use for the family, and these days I never use it. I spent more on tax, insurance and servicing than fuel in the whole of the last year. It hardly seems worth having it.

So, considering I live out in the countryside where the buses don't run at useful times, commute just once a week to the station 10 miles away, but want to be able to go 20 miles to Guildford and back reasonably quickly from time to time without leaving my wife without a car, what can I replace my car with that is more environmentally friendly? Ideas, anyone?

Newest Carbon Dieter

If it's been a bit quieter than normal around here recently, there is a pretty good reason. On 4th February, my baby daughter Amelia was born. The whole family is doing well, and adjusting to the new presence around the house. However, it might be a while until I get back to coding in my spare time!

It should be interesting to see the effect on my carbon footprint ;)

Server move completed

Well, the server move didn't take as long as I expected! I managed to get it all done yesterday, including the forum, so that's great. It should be substantially faster now, for rather technical reasons which I won't go into...

If anyone notices anything at all strange about the site since yesterday, please let me know.

Server Move

Oops - the server issues we had the other have also affected the forum, and I forgot to fix it. It should have fixed itself, but seems not to have done, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

However, there are bigger things afoot. The Carbon Diet is going to move servers (intentionally this time), to a new virtual server system from Slicehost. This should make the site faster, as well as dealing with a whole load of problems that I've had for a while. The forum system will be fixed during this move, but of course the Carbon Diet itself will have to go offline for a little while as well. The move will be done this week at some point, so I apologise if you get a "check back later" message at some point. I will keep the downtime to a minimum, hopefully no more than a couple of hours.

There are some other reasons for the server move as well, but I'm not making those public just yet... wait and see!

Back online

OK, the web host has reinstalled the required packages, and we're back online. Hopefully the site should be back to 100%, but if there are any problems, please let me know. Apologies once again for the problems.

Outage update

It seems that the current site problems have been caused by a server switchover at the web host. Apparently they are looking into it, and will have it up and running soon... fingers crossed!

UPDATE:
Ooh, I'm angry. The new server they have moved me to doesn't have the version of Rails on it that I was using for the website, therefore it doesn't work at all. Breaking existing websites is bad enough, but to do it without informing the owners of those sites in advance? Unforgivable, in my book. Grrrr. I will be sorting this out as soon as I can, but due to other commitments it will probably not be until late tonight. Grrr.

Site is down...

Hi everyone - unfortunately it looks like the site has gone down for some reason. Not sure why at the moment, something must have changed at my hosting provider, because I haven't changed anything for about 2 weeks. I'm looking into it, and hopefully will have it up and running as soon as possible. Apologies for the inconvenience!

Slow progress...

Just thought I'd say Happy New Year to all you lot out there, and explain a little about why progress has slowed a little on the site. I'm now working for Green Thing, managing their website, so naturally the Carbon Diet has had to take a bit of a back seat. However, it's still going, just at a slower pace.

I've been sorting out a few new features over the last little while, and I'm nearly ready to release what I'm going to call version 1, finally! There is still plenty to do after that though, so I'll be busy for a while! Hopefully, soon I'll be announcing some interesting news regarding the site and how it's going to go forward, so keep your eyes peeled, ears to the ground, etc etc.