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Previously on the blog, we pitched a particular framing of Beeminder in which paying is not punishment. People seem into it! Which is good because it was setting the stage for this announcement: We’ve killed the old »
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Death To Lifetime Plans
Saturday, January 9th, 2021
Announcement! Beeminder has stopped selling lifetime plans. Obviously if you already have one, we will honor it forever and ever . We’re just not selling new ones. We’ve thought about this hard and have five(ish) reasons: Inability to give lifetime people premium credit Special cases and complexity in the subscription logic Lifetime plans take away your leverage as... »
Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses “Ratcheting Breaks Breaks” Bug
Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
Are you somehow stumbling upon this blog post without knowing anything about Beeminder? Hoo-boy are you in the wrong place. But here’s a frenzied attempt to catch you up in time: Beeminder graphs your progress toward goals by drawing a bright line, called the Yellow Brick Road, that you commit... »
Announcement: The Yellow Brick Half-Plane Has Arrived
Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
Until today Beeminder had a fundamental design flaw that was baked in from literally day one. The first line of code for what would become Beeminder was to draw a line on a graph in Mathematica from a target weight to a goal... »
Feature Unannouncement: Death To Custom Lane Widths
Friday, May 1st, 2020
This is the next phase in our elaborate evil plan codenamed Yellow Brick Half-Plane. Benevolent plan, I meant to say. The previous phase was killing off auto-widening yellow brick roads. Background: Yellow Brick Whatnow? To start at the very beginning… The Yellow Brick Road is the path on your... »
Schedule Breaks On All The Things!
Monday, April 20th, 2020
There’s a huge irony in us shipping this feature during the coronavirus lockdown. Namely, none of us need it for the foreseeable future! Our calendars are like an infinite Euclidean half-plane covered in fresh snow. (Ok, fine, I floated that claim among some hardcore Beeminder users and they vehemently disagreed. Examples of why this is great during a pandemic... »
Death to Auto-Widening Yellow Brick Roads, Part 2
Monday, February 17th, 2020
If you’re just tuning in, and if you care about this for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons, you’ll want to start with (or stick with) our announcement that we have fully killed off auto-widening yellow brick roads. This is the part where we philosophize about why... »
Feature Unannouncement: Auto-Widening Yellow Brick Roads Have Gone Manual
Tuesday, January 28th, 2020
In which we explain how a big feature of early Beeminder, auto-widening yellow brick roads, was wrong-headed and what we’re doing now instead. This is Part 1 with Just The Facts and the probably-very-safe-assumption that you don’t care about the convoluted... »
Meet The New Gmail Zero, Same As The Old Gmail Zero
Tuesday, December 17th, 2019
Announcement! We’ve reworked Gmail goals to use a label instead of an arbitrary search query, because Google is making us. (Not just us. Any app wanting access to things like arbitrary search queries has to go through a $10k+ security audit now!) If you need to do something about your Gmail... »
Integery Goals, Timey-Wimey Goals, and Conservarounding
Wednesday, November 27th, 2019
Here’s a thing users really hated about Beeminder until today: when Beeminder told them they needed to floss their teeth 0.23 times or archive 6.8 emails or whatever nonsensical / physically impossible thing. I personally shrugged that off for years. Obviously you just mentally take the ceiling of that number, right? If you have to floss 0.23 times and... »