You know what we heard people like? Listicles! Here are the top 5 new Beeminder features and updates we randomly want to tell you about! If your favorite isn’t here, check the full list of 4,812 of them. (You read that right — Beeminder’s over-a-decade-long changelog has close to 5,000 entries and counting.)
1. The help docs!
Support Czar Nicky diligently keeps them impeccably up to date. If you have a question about a Beeminder thing, it’s probably in there! Head to help.beeminder.com or just google something like “Beeminder akrasia horizon” and generally one of our articles is the first hit.
2. The rainbow dashboard
It’s a little garish maybe, but we took a poll in the forum and almost everyone is either into it or expects to get used to it.
We’ll probably keep fussing with it. Chime in in the forum if you have opinions! Next we need to decide the color of the shed where we keep our bikes (just kidding).
(Shoutout to Beeminder superuser Michael Hanson for building his own custom Beeminder dashboard — which anyone can use by plugging in their API key — arguably prettier than ours.)
3. Goals can be “dark green” now
The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a subtle hue shift in the green there. Here’s a review of the colors:
- Red means you’re within 24 hours of derailing — aka a beemergency
- Orange means you have 1 day of safety buffer
- Blue means 2 days of safety buffer
- Green means 3 or more safe days
And now the slightly darker green means 7+ days of safety buffer. The nice thing about being dark green, as we explained in another old listicle, is that you’re immune to the akrasia horizon. If something comes up or you decide you hate your Beeminder goal (it happens), you can click Archive or schedule a flat section of the bright red line. It takes a week for such changes to take effect, but, lucky you, you have that much safety buffer! So instead of clicking Archive or scheduling your break and then toughing it out for another week, you can do that and then immediately check out. By the time your safety buffer runs out, your break will begin. Your friends will be dark green with envy.
(Special thanks to our friend and Beeminder superuser Grayson Bray Morris for suggesting something like this years ago.)
4. A new status page
We’re pretty sure our last unscheduled downtime last month or whenever that was was the last time that will happen, but just in case, we made a new status.beeminder.com page. Until now, that URL just redirected to a Twitter feed where we’d give updates on how engulfed in flames our servers were. But now you have to be logged in to Twitter (and maybe refer to it as X even) to see things there so that obviously doesn’t work as a status page anymore. So, ok, if you ever can’t reach Beeminder (or, in fact many/most websites) stick “status.” in front of the URL and see what’s up.
5. Weight loss goal headers are more sane
Have you ever tried a Beeminder weight goal? If so you might have noticed the insanity that was the goal page header, and generally any time we tried to tell you things about how much weight loss was due when. I’m sure you’ve been suffering nightmares ever since.
It is tempting to put a lot of words into trying to describe how wrong-headed it was, but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand cliches, eh?
before
Well the night terrors can end now! The goal page now tells you simply what your hard cap is today. You can get that both in terms of the delta (e.g. +0.25 — you can’t gain more than 0.25 stone and still be below the bright red line today), or in terms of the absolute amount (e.g. 14.25 stone — that’s the actual value of the bright red line today).
(If you see one and not the other, try clicking on the black button and it will toggle to the other version. This highly undiscoverable click-to-toggle business is another of our Long National Nightmares. We’re working on it!)
after
The header also tells you how long you can coast along not weighing in before you’re in trouble, but that’s not new.
Alright, that rounds out the list for now. (Again, see the changelog for more.) Keep telling us what you think we should do next!