Is there a way to mark specific events on a Beeminder graph?
For example, I have a graph that tracks my weight. I’ve recently started walking briskly for an hour a day. I’d like to be able to mark my weight graph with a star/dot/square/… that, when I hover over it, says “started daily 1-hour brisk walks today”. That would help me track how different lifestyle changes affect my weight.
Obviously I can include this information when I record the data point for the day in question, but those comments aren’t readily visible the way an annotation on the graph would be.
This is done! You can now add hashtags in your datapoint comments and they show up on the graph. Thanks to @philip for noticing that we pseudo-promised this by UVI#2000. It’s now delivered as UVI#2787:
UPDATE: There was one way it was broken, now fixed. Original regex: (?:^|\s)(#[a-zA-Z]\w+)(?:$|\s)
That last colon should’ve been an equal sign, duh. Lookahead assertion to not consume the post-hashtag whitespace. More than you wanted to know! (Now I’m wondering if it would be cleaner to split on whitespace and filter for valid hashtags…)
I guess so, but, at least until the layout is prettier, I’m erring on the side of only showing clearly intentional hashtags. So whitespace-separated, more than one character, and would work as a variable name in C-like programming languages.
Ah - this explains the mess I found this morning because some of my IFTTT applets for ToDoist integration default to putting #todoist on every data point! Need to clean those up.
I have a legacy of thousands of data entries with a leading hashtag (use it in Complice to identify beeminder-relevant units e.g. ‘Write code #wu 2’ where the ‘#wu’ denotes ‘work unit’ and the number after is a quantifier for this variable, similar to the #todoist example). Now, most of my graphs look completely over-crowded with text. Is there a way to either auto-clean past data or to turn this off?
Sorry for the hideousness there! We just added a setting to turn it off!
Also, for cases where there are many datapoints on the same day all with the same hashtag (some IFTTT recipes, for example, may do that) we now uniquify the set of tags.
I think part of the issue here is that the hashtags are there for different reasons. I have at least one messy goal aka the one above where it makes sense to turn off. The point with my hashtags is not to tag specific, larger events, but to rather simplify a future, potential data summary. When training, I tag with the type of training (endurance, strength, whatever), when playing games I tag with platform, etc. Stuff that are different between the datapoints, but where making different goals doesn’t really make sense.