Avatars

One more announcement for today, before I go to bed. We now have working avatars, so you can put an image of yourself (or something else of course) on your profile. I was using an external site called Gravatar for this before, but it's not been working for a couple of months now, so I've dumped it. Apologies if you went and signed up for a Gravatar account because of the Carbon Diet, but at least it works now. I look forward to seeing all your pictures :)

Bugs & Updates

Minor update to the group and friend rankings this morning - it should be quicker, and you now get a nice pie chart showing the contribution of each person in the list in a nice graphical way.

I've fixed a bug in the group signup code, which prevented you joining groups without being invited, so that should all work now.

Also, if you've tried to use Gravatar to customise your user picture on the site, you've probably noticed that it's not working. Fortunately (in a way) it's not just the Carbon Diet. Lots of sites using Gravatar seem to be having the same problem. Unfortunately, the people behind it have disappeared, and left their site in a broken state. I've been trying to contact them for ages about this, but to no avail. I'm going to look round for an alternative method of letting you customise your pictures, so I'll keep you informed.

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.

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!

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.