In my original post about losing weight I posted a chart showing progress. It used a shortcode to pass the data to a bit of javascript from Google. The downer is that I had to edit that post every day and add a day’s data to an increasingly long string. It didn’t seem to scale.
I thought about some other options. I was going to make a Settings page with a set of repeater fields, and update that, but I couldn’t find a small library and I didn’t want to write it by hand.
I thought about using Sugar Calendar and simply putting the date on every day. I should mention that I’d like the data to be available in more places than one, so I could make something else with it someplace else, so I was going to make an endpoint on my blog no matter what I chose.
A good talk with Bill Erickson helped me see the light. Google sheets can return a JSON blob if you pass the right URL. So now the data is stored in Google Sheets, accessible from anywhere, and I update it there rather than updating a single blog post every day.
I’ve also put some stats in the bottom of my sidebar.
I haven’t exactly lost a pound a day since the beginning, WordCamp US set me back quite a bit, but it’s still moving steadily and I am content.
Total Weight Lost: 0 lbs. in 0 days.
