Tweet, Eat, Post!
Twitter to Food Journal Form - Version 2!
Version 2 is HERE! Midnight problem solved! AND new #food and #activity tracking! Please read new instructions below...
Enter your twitter username below and click submit
What to see it action try my username: RonisWeigh if I'm food journaling today you'll see what I ate so far! To see Twitter page (the source), click here.
Twitter to Food (aka Tweet, Eat, Post) Journal Overview
If you don't know what twitter is click here. In short, you create an account and tell people what you are doing in 140 characters or less. Some of us geeks (admit it, if you have a twitter account you're a geek ;~) "tweet" all day and use it as a way to communicate with friends and family and, in my case, other blog losers. :~)
There are already a host of tools and twitter has pretty much permeated the market. So why not use this nifty site to our advantage?
How?
Well your twitter has a feed and I can read that feed (I'm not special, anyone can.) So by simply formatting a tweet a certain way I can strip out your food journal entries and build a nifty table for your blogs! No more transcribing your food journal to your blog at the end of the day. Simply enter you twitter username above and viola! HTML formatted table of your food journal entries.
Here's the catch. You must format your food journal tweets like so...
#food Whatever you ate today (units)
Or
#activity What ever you did today (-units)
My script will be looking for the word "#food" and/or "#activity" no quotes and WITH the # sign. It will then take what you wrote and place it in a table. It will also take the units you placed in the the parenthesis and put them in the unit column. Units can be points, calories, carbs, whatever! The program will then add up all your food units, subtract all your activity units and viola! Your done! Even if you don't want to post the table it's fun to come at the end of the day and check out your totals.
Notice the "-" minus sign before units when you are tweeting #activity, this is required or you will be adding activity points instead of subtracting them.
Keep in mind you can still use twitter to post other things, my program will just ignore the non- Food# or Activity# related posts.
My plans are to make it much more robust in future versions but I wanted to gage interest and get feedback before continuing. Ideas are welcome but please bear in mind I'm only one person so some advanced features, although possible may take me awhile. :~)
Why?
Well some of us like to stay accountable by being conscious of what we eat. I truly believe by pausing and "tweeting" (journaling) it can help us become aware of what we are about to eat and maybe even why we are about to eat it. The whole idea is to end mindless munching!
Using something like twitter can be a fun way to keep a food journal and now (if you have a blog) you can easily extract your food entries without duplicated work.
Want to see it in action? Try entering my twitter name (ronisweigh).
Known Issues
- If you go over 20 tweets a day, your early entries may get cut off. Not sure what how to fix this as twitter limits it's feed to 20 posts.
- It evaluates "the day" so if you go past midnight it will ignore all previous food entries from the prior day. All fixed now it just evaluates the last 24 hours.
Please leave any comments, ideas and questions below!
