At the request of @dreev , I’m sharing my thought on a visualization request. For some long-standing goals my buffer often floats over time; for sleep specifically, I aim to stay in the “green” 3 days above the red line, but due to life circumstances that can fall or rise. It’s not easy to see these changes in the traditional beeminder graph because it’s cumulative, and as the graph grows the ability to see the distance of the data point from the red line shrinks. One can get a little bit of this by seeing the dot color but that’s fairly coarse and only for those whose buffer range meaningfully crosses yellow/blue/green threshholds.
In addition to the standard graphing the cumulative sum on the y axis, I proposed graphing the buffer as an option. This way, even if the goal is long-standing, one can easily see how the buffer has changed over time. There’s some complications in this approach that I haven’t yet fully thought through (e.g. not being able to see changes in rate, breaks, etc.) but I thought I would throw it out there. Two pictures to demonstrate the point (crude python/seaborn graphs incoming):
^ This graph is only 2 months worth of my sleep data but it’s already hard to see the trend changes
^ This graph shows the buffer to the redline in hours
Edit: I should mention I fixed the buffer graph y-scale to 7 days of buffer as a reasonable intuition that once you are above the y-scale you are beyond the event horizon… so the whole y-scale goes from derailment to event horizon!
For a while on several of my goals (including one for bedtimes) I was manually opening the thumbnail in a new tab, then URL-hacking to get the original full-size picture that (unlike the graph on the goal page) showed at least the colored dots for every day. I think that broke for a while, but it seems to be functioning right now.
Having buffer visualization with first-class support and direct UI inclusion would be really helpful!
I think you can more directly get to that image via beeminder.com/username/goalname.png. Or click the little chain icon that appears in the upper left of the graph:
But how that image could be different from what’s shown on the goal page, I can’t imagine. I’d love to see screenshots if you spot that happening again.
