The Carbon Diet is open source!

Well, I finally got round to it. The Carbon Diet is now open source software, under the Affero GPL v3 license. This means you can download and improve the code, and get it uploaded onto the site! You could even install your own copy on another server, and make any changes you like as long as you release the source code to your changed version.

I was waiting until I'd tidied the code so that it wasn't embarrassing any more, but then decided that was never going to happen, so I've gone ahead just done it. There's lots of work to do - 72 issues on the list - but now that it's open source, if you'd like to help make it better, I'd love to have you on board :)

The developer area is linked from the site in numerous places (the "code" tab at the top, for instance), or you can just follow this link straight to github to get the code.

Earth Day 2009

Today was Earth Day, which is always fun. However, today was a bit more fun, as the Carbon Diet got covered on CNET. According to the article, "You'll learn a lot from Carbon Diet. It's the best carbon calculator I've seen", which is a pretty good present for Earth Day!

Because of that, there's been a fair amount of new traffic today - Hi to all our new users! I've upgraded the server it's running on the cope with the increase in load, so hopefully it will stay reasonably quick...

The Carbon Diet goes to Ireland

Well, OK, we're not actually going to Ireland, but we do now have data for Ireland in there, so if you've been waiting for that, then your time has come!

Apologies if it's been a bit quiet on the development front this last year - having a child seems to have wiped out all my time, somehow :)

However, there have been some minor updates happening quietly. If you have a CurrentCost electricity monitor, I've written some software to upload the data into the Carbon Diet, which is pretty cool - it's still in development, but contact me if you want to have a go.

Also, I've started rearranging the site to a more modern code layout. The first area to be affected is flights. You shouldn't notice much of a difference, apart from the added bonus that now you get a nice map of your flights, with line thickness showing carbon impact. This is part of a expansion of the analysis tools that I am trying to do, which will add things like individual analysis graphs for each account type, which should be useful for looking at things in detail.