Sam Starling

Quote

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to management than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely the lukewarm defense in those who gain by the new ones.”
— Nicolo Machiavelli

Analysing Exercise

Recently, I’ve been using Dailymile to track my running, a service which is basically like Google Analytics for exercise. It’s nice and simple to input data and has nice ways of tracking progress – for example, I’ve burned 26.88 donuts so far, but have still only made it 0.00% around the world. Still, there’s a goal.

Whilst it has an API, it’s still difficult to get recent data out of the service in a format that isn’t one of the badges they provide. However, a little bit of Javascript and RegEx magic later, and I’ve written a quick PHP wrapper that gets the latest data for a particular user and spits it out. You can see it in action on the right hand side.

I’ve started a project on Google Code where you can see the code and download it. You’re more than welcome to use and/or modify it, and it’d be great to hear from you if you do. Download it here. Hopefully putting the figures here for all to see might persuade me to run a bit more…