Minding a friend's goal (adding data)

Akrasia
1

Hi,

I have a friend who wants me to help her be accountable with a “do more” goal (and, of course, I’m recommending Beeminder). I guess the easiest way would be for her to greenlight my email address for adding data? Or would the process be more foolproof (not allowing her to add data, for example) if we used ITTT (which I’m familiar with) or Zapier (which I am not very familiar with)?

Thanks!

Amanda

2

The API is your best bet, but you’ll need your friend’s auth token (gotten by asking your friend to go to https://www.beeminder.com/api/v1/auth_token.json when logged in to Beeminder and give you the “auth_token” value) in order to do this. There are several CLI tools that allow you to interact with Beeminder from the terminal, if you’re comfortable with that. For example GitHub - lydgate/bmndr: Simple python CLI for beeminder.com.

You can set up the goal you want accountability on so that it gets its data from the API, which should? I think? remove the option of adding manual data from the website.

Then, when you want to add data, you can run a CLI command once you’ve set up your tool of choice (example from the cli above):

#  bmndr $GOALNAME $DATA_VALUE $COMMENT
bmndr yourfriendsgoal 5 "Data for today"
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3

Even if she’s the one adding data, you could use IFTTT to send you a notification whenever she does. There are IFTTT triggers for adding data to any goal or to specific named goals.

You could also set IFTTT up to let you know when it’s a beemergency day for her so that you can be proactively supportive.

List of ITTT triggers and actions for Beeminder

4

Luckily, the answer is super easy – you can just use the email bot. No need to use the API, or have your friend’s auth token, and you don’t even need to specifically whitelist the email address.

More info here: Can anybody else add data to my goal? - Beeminder Help

It’s not really possible to tighten things up so your friend has no way of adding data for herself, but she could switch the goal to be Zapier/IFTTT/etc instead of manual, in the settings. It would still allow you to add data for her via email, but the web interface wouldn’t have an entry form for her.

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