I’ve been logging keystrokes and footsteps to a web page I call my Featbeat. My plan with Featbeat is to create the WordPress of quantified self – an open source logging platform.
Why? It’s not just because “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” It’s also because measuring things tends to change behavior.
Right now, everything is stored in the Featbeat database, but my plan is that eventually, all the data will be stored as a custom Tent post type.
Tent is a distributed social networking profile currently designed for status updates, blog posts, and sharing photos. It is designed to be extended for new types of posts – like quantified self logging data. Since Tent is a protocol, not a social network – you use it just like you use email. You can have an account on whatever service you choose, and people (from other services) can follow you. Then, you would be able to approve apps to log to your database, and other apps to visualize it.
In addition to the Nike+ and keystroke loggers, I manually enter data like pushups completed and protein eaten (at least sometimes). Next up on the project, I need to normalize the english language sentences that comprise the log format. I’d also like to add some graphs.
Also, the process of signing in by using your Tent profile URL is not user friendly (and buggy – you have to specify the exact same URL every time). That needs to be fixed before Tent suffers the same fate as OpenID.