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.

Facebook Group

For those of you who also use Facebook, I've just created a group for Carbon Diet users. Please join up, and invite your friends! I'm working on a facebook application as well, so that you can put your carbon footprint in your profile, but it's fighting about 20 other things for my attention, so it might be a little while before it's up and running.

Group Invitations

I've just uploaded a new feature - group invitations. You can now invite your friends to groups which you are a member of, which should make it easier to network with people. You can also create invitation-only groups, which users can't join unless they are invited by another user. Next up, I'll be adding a more general "invite your friends" option so that you can easily get your friends to use the Carbon Diet!

Funding

How does a project like this get funded? I can fund a couple of months off work to get it going, but where does it go from there? I'd really like to avoid having to advertise on the site, apart from perhaps the odd affiliate link, but if it has to be that way in the end then so be it. Either way, until the site starts getting a lot of traffic, that isn't going to generate any substantial income anyway. How, then, do I carry on hosting and developing the site when my money runs out? It seems to me like there should be someone out there funding innovative approaches to carbon footprint reduction, but I've not found them yet. I'm spending a lot of time on the phone at the moment trying to find out, but if anyone knows any sources of funding for projects such as this one, please let me know...

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!

Shiny New Graphics

I've done a few more updates over the last couple of days, mostly on the graphical side of things. The site now looks a little bit slicker, a bit more modern, and should be more accessible to new users with a new login page. Also, the "remember me" button should work now so you won't have to log in every single time.

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!