Good idea, but I’m not sure if it can be worked into an rss feed, and if not it’ll be tricky to implement. I plan on asking a more tech-savvy friend about it later tonight, though.
If we did do this, it seems to me that it’d need at least two dimensions: Likelihood of the advice working, and usefulness of the advice when it does work. The second might actually be more important than the first, for this purpose—if something works consistently, it seems like it’d be better to establish it as a habit rather than being intermittently reminded of it and otherwise ignoring it. (And we could certainly publish a list of suggested habits if the data points that way for enough things.)
Good idea, but I’m not sure if it can be worked into an rss feed, and if not it’ll be tricky to implement. I plan on asking a more tech-savvy friend about it later tonight, though.
I would say that the whole thing, setting up the server, RSS feeds, and some basic statistics gathering, excluding the database of horoscopes themselves, is a one- or two-weekend project for a reasonably experienced web programmer. Javascript and forms won’t work in all RSS readers, but links will. So an entry in the RSS feed would look like this:
Today’s horoscope: You will notice a place you ought to visit today
Yesterday’s horoscope was: You will start a conversation with a stranger today This horoscope was: untrue unhelpful true awesome
And you do some server-side magic at the destination to gather stats about who clicks on which links, filter out duplicates, and decide what to put in the feed next.
Good idea, but I’m not sure if it can be worked into an rss feed, and if not it’ll be tricky to implement. I plan on asking a more tech-savvy friend about it later tonight, though.
If we did do this, it seems to me that it’d need at least two dimensions: Likelihood of the advice working, and usefulness of the advice when it does work. The second might actually be more important than the first, for this purpose—if something works consistently, it seems like it’d be better to establish it as a habit rather than being intermittently reminded of it and otherwise ignoring it. (And we could certainly publish a list of suggested habits if the data points that way for enough things.)
I would say that the whole thing, setting up the server, RSS feeds, and some basic statistics gathering, excluding the database of horoscopes themselves, is a one- or two-weekend project for a reasonably experienced web programmer. Javascript and forms won’t work in all RSS readers, but links will. So an entry in the RSS feed would look like this:
And you do some server-side magic at the destination to gather stats about who clicks on which links, filter out duplicates, and decide what to put in the feed next.