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.

Version 0.10 online

I'm very pleased to announce the general release of air travel functionality. You can now calculate your climate impact from air travel and see it alongside your domestic emissions. I predict you will be surprised...

It's a real relief to have it out there! I've had air travel working for a while now for the testers, but the graphs have been a real problem, because flight emissions are literally off the charts compared to the rest. However, by changing over to amCharts, the problem is solved. Your charts are also now much more interactive and fun to play with.

This is version 0.10, and it's the last one before the full 1.0 release (at least on my list). The next release will mainly be for tidying up loose ends that have been hanging around, and fixing any major bugs that turn up.

Let me know what you think of it!

Flight figures updated

Testers take note: I've just made some changes to the figures used for flight calculations, so some of you may find that your carbon footprints have leapt up a bit (mine has)!

I was originally using DEFRA figures for aviation emissions, but they do not take into account the extra effect of releasing greenhouse gases at high altitude, which is estimated to be around 2.7 times higher! I've found some better figures, so hopefully the new numbers will reflect better the actual climate impact of flying. I've also added the ability to select your class of seat. First class seats take up around 3 times the room of an economy seat, so if you choose to fly this way, your emissions will be 3 times as high!

I'm trying out a new graphing engine this afternoon, and if it works, then hopefully I'll be able to release flights across the entire site later on today!

Air travel in testing

It's been a while coming, I know, but air travel has finally been uploaded onto the site. At the moment, it's only open to testers (if you want to become a tester, let me know). It needs a bit of use before I can confidently release it generally, but rest assured that it won't be long now. Also, in the same update, there are a bunch of changes to the profile page and calculation engine. It now takes into account up to a whole year of data if you have it, and it handles inactive accounts (i.e. old cars) much better, so in general the figures should be more accurate. You can also see a list of your top actions on the profile page, so they are a bit more accessible and obvious. I hope you like the updates, and as always, please send feedback through the forum!

How long?

Has it been nearly a month since the last post? It's certainly been a busy time, with lots of meetings going on to try and get this thing to stand on it's own feet. We've got quite a few people using the site now (passed 300 the other day), which is great, but unfortunately with all these meetings (and a few other things going on), I've not had a lot of time for coding. The air travel stuff is mostly written, but it's forcing me to make some changes to the display side of things as well, so there's a bit more to do yet. Forum activity is increasing as well, with lots of suggestions and feedback coming my way, which is brilliant - keep it up!

The thing the site really needs is more publicity, so please, if you can, let people know about it! Invite your friends to join, write on blogs, post to news sites, anything you can think of - it all helps!

So, in summary, nothing major to report at the moment really, but I thought I'd keep you all up to date. The project is still going, it's just getting to be a bit of a handful for one person with no funding :)

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!