Spaces surrounding goalnames

I saw this UVI

When signing up, we were telling you your email address was invalid and not letting you hit submit if you had any space after your email addres. Silly! #bugfix

and it made me think of a problem I have every time I try to create a new goal on an iOS device…

  • Goals can’t have spaces in their names (fair enough) so I create the goal and call it “smushedtogetherwords” or somesuch.
  • iOS spots my missing spaces (or spots the lack of them at least) and tries to ‘correct’ it to “smushed together words”.
  • I hit the button to say that I really do mean “smushedtogetherwords”, and iOS adds a space to the end to move onto the next word
  • Beeminder complains that I can’t put spaces in goalnames
  • I delete the final space and submit and all is well

It’s not a major problem, just an annoying little dance that I’ve done numerous times lately as I’ve been taking a leaf out of @shanaqui’s book (ho ho) and making a goal for each book I’m reading in an attempt to finish things in a reasonable time (which is being really successful, yay!) and if there’s a way to avoid that annoying little dance I’d appreciate it!

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Ooh, great bug report! And sounds like a dirt-simple UVI for us – just do what we did for email addresses on signup for goalnames in goal creation!

PS: This earns you stickers – DM me a postal address to claim them!

PPS: And now it’s actually fixed: http://beeminder.com/changelog#3698

It’s really effective, right?

What sort of rate are you using? Are you doing the same “really easy rate but ratcheting” trick, or are you okay with just pushing yourself?

I’m mostly doing a straightforward “read this in the 3 weeks” as that’s the library loan period and my Libby reads kept being returned before I’d finished them and it was getting annoying! Three weeks feels about right for a limit so I’m more or less sticking with that for non-library books as well. Except I’ve done a couple that run to the end of the month for books I wanted to tick off as having read in January for other reasons.

I’ve just been making them with straight roads for the whole period (using page numbers or the ones on my iPad for electronic books) which seems to be working fine.

I like reading multiple books at a time but I’d stopped doing that as much in the last few years and this is letting me get back to being a multiple book reader without fearing I’ll lose track of things. I end up reading more when I have multiple books on the go as it’s easier to pick one that suits my mood. Having the freedom to start a new book so long as beeminder isn’t breathing down my neck is great too, I’m not worrying that I’ll forget about any individual book for too long or that I’m somehow being unfaithful to them or something!

Aaaah yes! Exactly. And I used to have lists or put them on my Goodreads or something, but that wasn’t also a push to actually read them. Hence why Beeminder is working great.

I’m currently beeminding my way through a shelf of sad, abandoned books/series where I totally did lose track of books I was reading at the same time:

(Just the books in the foreground – the ones further back are just our comics shelves.)

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