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Introducing Joe’s Goals Badges - plus bug fixes and more

Example Badge“How can I show my score to my friends?” That is one of the most common requests I get as captain of the H.M.S. Joe’s Goals. Well ask no longer!

Today, thanks to the mad Jedi coding powers of an ordinary Joe’s Goals user, we are introducing Badges. Joe’s Goals Badges are live graphics that you can put on your website, MySpace page, and personal blog that display your daily score along with your weekly and monthly average in a simple chart format. It is a great way to hold yourself accountable and keep your friends informed on how you are doing meeting your goals.

You can see my badge on the right hand navigation bar.

The super-fast badge system was built by Joel Seligstein who is studying to be a DBA at University of Tennessee. Joel contacted me a few weeks ago and asked if he could do anything cool for the Joe’s Goals project, and boy did he succeed! I’m very excited to be able to open up the badge interface for all users to take advantage of. Thanks Joel!

To get started simple go to the Preferences page and scroll to the bottom where you should see an option to Enable badges. Once enabled, the badge will be displayed for preview and you can quickly configure the size and format to your liking. To add it to your webpage simply copy the HTML into your file or editor. Boom! You have a live chart to track your goal achievement progress.

In addition to the new badge system, I’ve also included a number of small updates and bug fixes. The highlights of the update are below:

  • You can now right click on Logbooks to add a log entry although you still need to left click on goals and selected Edit Log.
  • Log Notes are now available in the backup CSV file available on the Preferences page.
  • Tool tips that display Log Notes when you mouse over the goal grid have been changed to only appear for cells that contain a note, speeding up the time it takes to render the goal tracker.
  • I’ve included a list of headlines from Joe’s Blog in an effort to keep people better informed with what is going on around the site.

I think that about does it for this update. Check out the Badge system and keep sending feedback and bug reports here. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 2:18 pm and is filed under code updates, joes's goals, life hacks. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Introducing Joe’s Goals Badges - plus bug fixes and more”

1

Wow! Love the idea, but hate the fact that now everyone will know how lazy I’ve been on any given day! :) )

2

A Joe’s Goal badge for your web site

I think I’ve mentioned about a dozen times how much I like Joe’s Goals, and I can’t help waving my arms every time its creator, Ian Smith, drops in another great new feature. Today that feature is a brand new badge that embeds a chart of your your r…

3

[…] Introducing Joe’s Goals Badges Joe’s Goals is a pretty cool goal tracking site. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, so maybe I’ll have to add one on LifeDev (tags: goals goaltracking Joes) […]

4

This is a really great feature that will have the added bonus of boosting Joe’s Goals’ search rankings a bit. Great feature. Thanks, Joel!

5

This is a great idea. I’d like to see some way to add this badge as a feed or gadget to my Google homepage, if that is at all possible! Thanks!

6

Hey, just signed up and love the app so far. The badge doesn’t use transparency at the corners, so it shows up as white on my blue background :(

And while I’m posting a comment, the “Down” function doesn’t seem to work for sorting. I had a friend confirm this.

7

[…] Set badges up so that they now display on your goal grid when you turn them on. This is a great way to see a quick chart of your progress even if you don’t end up adding the badge to your blog or MySpace page. […]

8

[…] Thanks to the awesome coding skills of Daniel Beck you can now add your Joe’s Goals badge to your Google Personalized Homepage! Daniel is a Technical Writing undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. Everyone give him a round of applause! You can view his blog by clicking on his name above. […]