Jun 23, 2008
In the last 3 months I have put on almost 1.5 stone. It is time to knuckle down and do something about it. Being a geek, the best way I know to do this properly is to build a webapp to help me track my progress. I have been working on a small app called TWEET MY WEIGHT. The system works by signing up for an account on the website www.tweetmyweight.com and entering in your details including your twitter name. Once you are signed up, each time you weigh yourself you can tweet the results to @myweight and TMW will scrape this information and build a sexy graph enabling you to track your progress. The graph is available via the website or as a small widget you can post on any website or social network. The basic system is built and working but before launch I am hoping to add more features, such as:
- Weekly progress reports sent to you via Twitter.
- Reminders if you stop reporting progress via Twitter.
- A leader board tracking the most successful users.
Hopefully I should have a beta open and available for registrations in a few weeks. Watch this space.
Update: Funnily enough someone sent me a link to a blog entry posted on Lifehacker today. It seems someone has already discovered Twitter can help dieters. Hopefully TMW should help people just like this as (I hope) it will me. Bye bye belly…
Jun 6, 2008
I wanted to take a moment to praise a new desktop product that has really changed the way I work. Dropbox is a desktop application that interfaces with an online storage service of the same name. It enables you to have a folder on your machine that is constantly in sync with the copy online, and any other machines you have the software installed on. I stumbled on a really useful way of using the service. I created a ‘web’ folder inside the Dropbox folder and moved all my website projects into that. I then opened up MAMP which I use to run a local copy of Apache and mySQL and told it to use this new folder as its default web root. I did the same on my work machine and my laptop. Dropbox syncs the files and folders, which means I can be confident that whatever machine I sit down at to work, I always have the latest versions of all the files ready and running locally. Great!
On top of that, by digging a little deeper you’ll find that the Dropbox web interface gives you extensive versioning information on all your data, letting you restore deleted files and roll back to previous versions. I recently deleted an entire folder of work, which after a few minutes of panicking I realised Dropbox could restore for me at the click of a button. For someone that can’t be bothered to get to grips with a full Subversion system this is a fantastic alternative. Currently the beta service allows you 5GB of storage. I thoroughly recommend it.
