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!

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 :)

Long haul

I've just completed my the Carbon Diet version 0.9. It's been a whole month since 0.8 was completed, so this one has taken quite a while. I've been uploading the changes as I've been making them, so there aren't actually any major new features to announce right now; this is just a way to close off that cycle. It was mostly aimed at social features like the comment system, working avatars, league tables for your friends and groups, and so on. There were also a few major bugfixes; for instance, the email reminder system should now work properly.

Anyway, now that this iteration is complete, it's on to the next one. This one is quite exciting, because it will add the one major thing the site is missing, and which a lot of people have been asking for - air travel! Watch this space, there will be something to play with very soon!

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 :)