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.

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!

Resurgence Article

The Carbon Diet has had a nice little writeup in this month's edition of Resurgence magazine, which among other things says that "this could turn out to be the Facebook of climate change", which is rather nice! You can buy Resurgence in a few places around the country, or you can buy a downloadable PDF online and save a tree.

New social features

I've uploaded a couple of new social features that you can play with. There are two ways to find out if someone has written on your profile; you will now get an email notification if you've given us your address, but you can also subscribe to an atom feed for the comments. These changes should make it easier to keep up with your comments. As well as that, if you invite your friends using the "invite contacts" page, once they join up, the site will automatically send you a friend request. When inviting people, you can also select a group that they will be added to when they sign up. This should make it easier for you to create groups with your friends. As always, if you have any comments, let me know in the forum!

Incidents and accidents

Oops! It seems that a bug crept in with the flight update a couple of days ago which caused an error for users who hadn't entered any data yet. It should be fixed now - I've tested it out manually, and now I'm going to write a bunch of test code to catch problems like this before they make it to the main site. Also, every time there is an error on the main site from now on, I will get an email, so I'll be able to catch these things as soon as they appear. So, apologies for the problems, but we're good to go once again. Sorry about that!

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!