It took me a little while to figure out that these goals all had the same deadline. Any reason why some give the time and others give hours? Why not just one or the other, or, better yet, both? Maybe something like:
+0.15 due in 3h 09m 47s (6:30pm) or pay $5
I shall without hesitation point you to this merry thread where I too have explored this oddity. May it help shine light upon the conundrum that is the dashboard!
Immediate answer: clicking them toggles between the two ways of showing the deadline!
Meta: This is a usability disaster and I’m very eager to change it, possibly to what you suggested!
I came to report this, but saw it had already been reported…
These goals are in order of deadline, but some are by number of hours and some are by time, apparently randomly.
To get some consistency, you can reset them all by opening the developer tools, and entering in the console the command localStorage.clear().
This will reset Beeminder’s localStorage and give you that consistency you want—but it’s unfortunate that there isn’t a way to do this without using the browser’s developer tools.
(But, on the other hand, a basic familiarity with the browser’s developer tools is a very useful thing to have.)
Cool, thanks!
What else does that clear though?
Nothing of any real importance: whether or not a cumulative goal shows you the target amount due, or just the delta; on each goal page, which tab is open (“commitment”/“stop/pause”/“data”/“statistics”/“settings”), how the datapoints in the data tab are sorted (I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to sort your datapoints lexicographically by their comments, but however you do sort them, Beeminder will remember that the next time you return to that goal’s datapoints.)
Maybe also a few other things I’m missing, but that’s not the point. All this stuff is necessarily ephemeral: if you switch browsers or devices you’re going to start from zero with the localStorage. So it can’t, by its very nature, include anything more substantial than this kind of minor UI detail.
(If you want to see for yourself what it includes, you can go ahead and run in the devtools something along the lines of console.log(localStorage) and take a look.)
Good to know - I definitely consider that stuff to be of real importance! Having to reset 40 goals to automatically open to Settings like they should would be a pain.
I use that sometimes: I have disjunctive goals which are satisfied when any one of several conditions are met, and I code in the comments which condition, so sorting by comments lets me see how often each of the conditions were met.
Thanks for the info on developer tools - do you have a link or resource or anything where I could learn more about how to use them?
Here are some docs for the Firefox dev tools, and here is Chrome’s.
But the most interesting part of the dev tools, the console, is “just” a REPL where you can run Javascript code in the context of the page. So its real power isn’t anything specific to it: you can access everything the page can access in Javascript, using the exact same browser APIs.
Thus, the exact same way the page itself can access (or clear) localStorage is how you yourself would do the exact same thing in the devtools console. And it’s not just localStorage, of course: you have full access to anything the javascript on the page has access to. This can be extremely useful, as you can imagine.
