5 ms·

As I suppose many of the people here do, I have a long list of pet projects that I plan to one day finish. One of them is lineardiet.com. The idea is simple.

As I suppose many of the people here do, I have a long list of pet projects that I plan to one day finish. One of them is lineardiet.com. The idea is simple. You just enter your current weight (C) and your desired weight (D). The service then plots you a graph with a line from weight C to weight D. The Y axis is the weight and the X axis is time. Now you have to weigh yourself every day. If you are above the line it's BROCCOLI DAY (as in: watch what you eat). If you are below the line it's PIZZA DAY (as in: eat whatever you like). That's it. It's guaranteed to work! :) Could be a fun little service. Business model? I plan to collect all the fat people are losing and sell it as eco-fuel. ;) No, not really. It's just for fun. Now if I only didn't have a ton of other projects like this plus a life to lead... one day... Actually, I leave this as a question to the HN community: what would be fastest way for me to finish this service? I'm talking hours of development time, not days. How would you build it?

stevelosh 16y ago
On building it quickly: * Use a tiny framework like Flask that will let you get up and running quickly. It's a two-page site -- you don't need Django/Rails. * Pare down the features to the bare minimum: no signups, accounts, etc. You put in your numbers, get sent to lineardiet.com/diet/abc123/ and have to bookmark that if you want to get back to it.. * Use an simple data model like: ID -> {start_date, end_date, start_weight, end_weight}. * Render graphs in-browser with Raphael.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
phreanix 16y ago
Is the site in german?
- jws 16y ago
  It is a parked domain. Interesting choice to shill from a parked domain in a language with only 100 million native speakers.
  - wozer 16y ago
    Actually, only 10 million speakers.
- zyb09 16y ago
  It's swedish.
joshwa 16y ago
http://www.myweightracker.com/about http://www.myweightracker.com/about
jws 16y ago
There is an iPhone app called Bang Bang that does just this. It has warts[1], but overall does the job. If I were doing it I'd use the HTML-5 localStorage and the 'manifest' offline web page stuff and just keep it all on person's phone.[2] Maybe I'd sync it up to a server somewhere in case they lost their phone. [1] Warts list: • Bang Bang is inexplicably slow. I'm down the stairs, through the house and out the door sometimes before I can get my weight entered. • The keyboard entry is inappropriate. Even assuming you want keyboard, you only need 10 digits and a decimal point, the whole keyboard makes the touch points to small and fiddly. Still better would be a roller. Today's weight is pretty close to yesterday's. One motion would suffice. • Some error checking wouldn't be bad. If I accidentally enter 600 pounds more than yesterday, maybe flag me instead of just graphing the result. • The starting date is lost in the UI. • The UI to get the starting weight and ending targets is unintuitive and will only be found by accident. Like by tapping at the screen while yelling "Why is this tiny graph so slow to draw‽"
dreeves 16y ago
This idea is exactly how my and Bethany Soule's pet project, kibotzer.com, started. It has worked great for a bunch of family and friends (although they often yo-yo back when they stop reporting their weight to kibotzer!). A tweak to your broccoli vs pizza day (great way to put it!): It's hard to take broccoli day seriously if it's just a random fluctuation. So we have a Yellow Brick Road that you follow to your goal. The centerline of the Road is what you call the line from C to D. And then there's a right and wrong lane of the Yellow Brick Road (lane width dynamically adjusts to account for random fluctuation) and broccoli mode starts in earnest when you're in the wrong lane and in danger of going off the Road. The biggest failure mode of kibotzer/lineardiet seems to be painting yourself into a corner by going above the line a bit planning to catch back up, and then a bit more, until it's hopeless. We have a bunch of ideas for how to address that...

stevelosh 16y ago

On building it quickly: * Use a tiny framework like Flask that will let you get up and running quickly. It's a two-page site -- you don't need Django/Rails. * Pare down the features to the bare minimum: no signups, accounts, etc. You put in your numbers, get sent to lineardiet.com/diet/abc123/ and have to bookmark that if you want to get back to it.. * Use an simple data model like: ID -> {start_date, end_date, start_weight, end_weight}. * Render graphs in-browser with Raphael.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

phreanix 16y ago

Is the site in german?

jws 16y ago
It is a parked domain. Interesting choice to shill from a parked domain in a language with only 100 million native speakers.
- wozer 16y ago
  Actually, only 10 million speakers.
zyb09 16y ago
It's swedish.

joshwa 16y ago

http://www.myweightracker.com/about http://www.myweightracker.com/about

jws 16y ago

There is an iPhone app called Bang Bang that does just this. It has warts[1], but overall does the job. If I were doing it I'd use the HTML-5 localStorage and the 'manifest' offline web page stuff and just keep it all on person's phone.[2] Maybe I'd sync it up to a server somewhere in case they lost their phone. [1] Warts list: • Bang Bang is inexplicably slow. I'm down the stairs, through the house and out the door sometimes before I can get my weight entered. • The keyboard entry is inappropriate. Even assuming you want keyboard, you only need 10 digits and a decimal point, the whole keyboard makes the touch points to small and fiddly. Still better would be a roller. Today's weight is pretty close to yesterday's. One motion would suffice. • Some error checking wouldn't be bad. If I accidentally enter 600 pounds more than yesterday, maybe flag me instead of just graphing the result. • The starting date is lost in the UI. • The UI to get the starting weight and ending targets is unintuitive and will only be found by accident. Like by tapping at the screen while yelling "Why is this tiny graph so slow to draw‽"

dreeves 16y ago

This idea is exactly how my and Bethany Soule's pet project, kibotzer.com, started. It has worked great for a bunch of family and friends (although they often yo-yo back when they stop reporting their weight to kibotzer!). A tweak to your broccoli vs pizza day (great way to put it!): It's hard to take broccoli day seriously if it's just a random fluctuation. So we have a Yellow Brick Road that you follow to your goal. The centerline of the Road is what you call the line from C to D. And then there's a right and wrong lane of the Yellow Brick Road (lane width dynamically adjusts to account for random fluctuation) and broccoli mode starts in earnest when you're in the wrong lane and in danger of going off the Road. The biggest failure mode of kibotzer/lineardiet seems to be painting yourself into a corner by going above the line a bit planning to catch back up, and then a bit more, until it's hopeless. We have a bunch of ideas for how to address that...