New support system: Tender

I've upgraded the Carbon Diet to use a great new integrated support system called Tender. You can create your own discussions, questions, and search the FAQs easily. In time, it will replace the existing (and very out-of-date) forum completely. One advantage is you don't have to log in separately to use it, which is an improvement.

I've had to make a change to the privacy policy to handle this; because we know automatically sign you in to Tender, we do provide some details to them, but this only happens when you actually go and visit the support site.

iPhone interface

Well, I've recently got around to a little bit of development on the site, and added an iPhone interface for adding data while on the move. It's much like the old mobile interface, but improved for use with the iPhone.

Now, if you visit http://carbondiet.org on your iPhone, you'll get the new site. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but fundamentally it's working.

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.

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 ;)