I set myself up to track how much time I spend actually working, using tagtime. The documentation for setting up tagtime to work with beeminder is pretty limited: it says to use a particular perl script, and then if you run that script (or look at the top comment) you can mostly figure it out. On beeminder, my graph would tell me that my time was being tracked automatically using tagtime, even before I’d set it up.
I had a hard time setting it up because I kept looking for how to get an api key, assuming that it wouldn’t let me update an arbitrary user’s graph, and that I must be missing something.
Yeah, the tagtime integration is super sketchy. It does let you update anyone else’s tagtime graph but if that happens before we get API keys worked out, it’s all undoable. The master copy of your data for a tagtime graph is your tagtime log.
Definitely let us know if there’s any vandalism or anything going on and we’ll clamp down right away. There are just very few tagtime users so far (it being a perl script, and of course the whole concept being a little nutty, cf http://messymatters.com/tagtime ) so it hasn’t been an issue. We adore beeminder/tagtime integration ourselves—like for http://beeminder.com/d/meta—but the tagtime part is really for hackers only right now.
Btw, we also added a 24-hour delay before charging anyone’s credit card so in case someone loses for any kind of technical reason (someone screwing with your graph, beeminder bug, or even your own extenuating circumstances a la http://blog.beeminder.com/sos ) you won’t lose. I guess I mentioned that in another comment. To further repeat, we’d refund a spurious charge regardless, but then we’d have to eat a small fee, so better to catch it before that.
A fundamental tenet of Beeminder is: no one ever loses money on a technicality. If you go off your yellow brick road it should be because your akrasia was more powerful than the amount of money you had at risk.
It should be, but I’ve never tried it with a ping gap other than 45 minutes! The way to find out is to count the actual number of pings in your tagtime log that have the relevant tags on a given day. Your beeminder datapoint for that day should be gap/3600 hours, where gap is the ping gap specified in your tagtime settings (45*60 by default).
Oh, and do a git pull if you haven’t since last week or so—at one time it was in fact hardcoded for 45 minutes.
I set myself up to track how much time I spend actually working, using tagtime. The documentation for setting up tagtime to work with beeminder is pretty limited: it says to use a particular perl script, and then if you run that script (or look at the top comment) you can mostly figure it out. On beeminder, my graph would tell me that my time was being tracked automatically using tagtime, even before I’d set it up.
I had a hard time setting it up because I kept looking for how to get an api key, assuming that it wouldn’t let me update an arbitrary user’s graph, and that I must be missing something.
Yeah, the tagtime integration is super sketchy. It does let you update anyone else’s tagtime graph but if that happens before we get API keys worked out, it’s all undoable. The master copy of your data for a tagtime graph is your tagtime log.
Definitely let us know if there’s any vandalism or anything going on and we’ll clamp down right away. There are just very few tagtime users so far (it being a perl script, and of course the whole concept being a little nutty, cf http://messymatters.com/tagtime ) so it hasn’t been an issue. We adore beeminder/tagtime integration ourselves—like for http://beeminder.com/d/meta—but the tagtime part is really for hackers only right now.
Btw, we also added a 24-hour delay before charging anyone’s credit card so in case someone loses for any kind of technical reason (someone screwing with your graph, beeminder bug, or even your own extenuating circumstances a la http://blog.beeminder.com/sos ) you won’t lose. I guess I mentioned that in another comment. To further repeat, we’d refund a spurious charge regardless, but then we’d have to eat a small fee, so better to catch it before that.
A fundamental tenet of Beeminder is: no one ever loses money on a technicality. If you go off your yellow brick road it should be because your akrasia was more powerful than the amount of money you had at risk.
I have a bit of confusion about tagtime too (I have already sent you an email, actually):
It is possible to alter the average poll time for tagtime—the default is 45 minutes and I have changed this to 25 minutes.
Will this poll period alteration be recognised by Beeminder? Beeminder does seem to be over-reporting time spent on activities so far...
It should be, but I’ve never tried it with a ping gap other than 45 minutes! The way to find out is to count the actual number of pings in your tagtime log that have the relevant tags on a given day. Your beeminder datapoint for that day should be gap/3600 hours, where gap is the ping gap specified in your tagtime settings (45*60 by default).
Oh, and do a git pull if you haven’t since last week or so—at one time it was in fact hardcoded for 45 minutes.
Actually, looking more carefully, beeminder is calculating accurately for an average of 25 minutes per ping.
Tagtime however got enthusiastic last night—while it pinged me normally for most of the night, it pinged eight times in the hour between 4 and 5 AM.
Beeminder then (reasonably) put me down for an extra hour of sleep that I didn’t actually get.
Them’s the breaks when dealing with randomised polling!