Organizing Beeminder goals into folders

Good evening,

I have a fair number of Beeminder goals, across different aspects of my life.
For the sake of simplicity let’s say I have 18 in total.
6 in school, 6 in work, 6 in personal.
I would love it if Beeminder gave me the ability to organize within a folder.

Within the school folder, I can create goals for each course.

Considering how many goals beeminder staff have, I’m surprised they haven’t released this feature.

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There are tags, which I think will do what you want, and would also allow you to put each goal into multiple “folders” if you wished to.

Here’s a couple of forum posts that should tell you everything you need to know but of course say if you need more info or if this won’t work for you!

I have these tags:

  • “book” - any book reading that I’m beeminding
  • “amreview” - goals that I want to glance at as part of my morning routine to ensure I know about all the actions I want to do that day
  • “time” - any goal that tracks time spent on things
  • “wk” (work) - goals related to my paid job, currently only one for total time and one for a specific project
  • “food” and “notfood” - every goal is in one of these, depending on whether it tracks food/water consumption or not
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Adding on to Alys’ post, if I ever set up tags again (which I’m not using at the moment – I touch every goal every day, so I prefer to just see them all at once) I’ll use @zzq’s My Beeminder browser extension to search them. (If you have that set up, then you can just hit f and the name of the tag and it’ll bring up just the goals with that tag.)

I’d love to see tags get spruced up a bit though, so it’d be interesting to know if the tags sound like what you need!

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Thanks for letting me know about tags!

Unfortunately it seems like they are more suited for desktop users, whereas I’m a mobile user.

Have a wonderful day!

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Ah, interesting. Beeminder in general is only really optimised for people who use the web version at the moment – the apps are intentionally bare-bones, just meant for adding data and getting reminders, and that’s a deliberate decision. It’s still useful to know you were hoping for more, though!

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Did you try the Altbee interface? That works well on mobile. Created by the active user @zzq. Here’s a direct link to it, it’s fairly self explanatory to set up: https://altbee.aeonc.com. It’s a free, alternative front-end UI to Beeminder. Altbee doesn’t add any additional cost.

I create one Altbee “category” for each Beeminder tag, and then associate each Altbee category with its corresponding Beeminder tag. Then the altbee interface will show you the list of all your goals, untagged goals first, followed by goals associated with each tag. Here’s what the interface looks like on mobile after it’s set up.

So in this example, “Exercise” and “DailyRoom” are Beeminder tags and Altbee categories.

Finally, on Android, I create a homescreen icon to go straight to Altbee so it looks like an app. In chrome, go to https://altbee.aeonc.com, then select the vertical “…” menu, select “Add to Home screen”.

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The goal categories in Altbee are designed for this. It’s not quite folders; but in my option it’s better.

Importantly, I designed it such that these categories are a level of granularity above tags: for instance, you might have a food tag and an exercise tag, but you’d display them together in a category named health.

One of my aims when building Altbee was to make something suitable for both desktop and mobile. And it’s a progressive web app, so you can “install” it on your phone and have it work just like any other app.

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Interesting, I didn’t know about progressive web apps. On another note, did I get this wrong? If so, I’ll correct my text.

Finally, on Android, I create a homescreen icon to go straight to Altbee so it looks like an app. In chrome, go to https://altbee.aeonc.com , then select the vertical “…” menu, select “Add to Home screen”.

I just assumed that’s what I did, but maybe I went through a different install process?

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Not at all. Different browsers do slightly different things, and also that “add to home screen” button can appear also for non-PWA sites, but do something slightly different there (adding something more like a bookmark than like an app install to your home screen.) But as a description of the steps one can use to install Altbee as an app-like PWA on your phone, you’ve got it right. (Though depending on the browser and the situation, the text that appears on the menu button can vary.)

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Hi, I tried tags but I can’t see them on desktop. Help?

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The page for adding tags is beeminder.com/tags, and then you can view your goals tagged with a specific thing by appending #tagname to the URL. There’s no real UI for tags right now, though. I use zzq’s browser extension personally; if I type f and then the name of a tag, it’ll filter my stuff down to just that tag, and it’s easier than changing the URL, reloading, etc.

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cries in Safari
Okay cool! Might be a reason to go back to Firefox. I was only checking out Safari for Mac OS Sonoma anyway…

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