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Sunday, September 9, 2007
The Hacker's Diet Online: 1000+ accounts open
The night of September 8–9, the thousandth user account on The Hacker's Diet Online was created; at this writing there are 1010 accounts open. As with many free resources on the Web, a substantial number of people create accounts, play with them a little, and then move on to something else, abandoning the account. Of the total of 1010 accounts, 583 (58%) are “active”, defined as having a weight log entry made in the last 30 days. A total of 321 accounts have opted to make their data visible to the public under an automatically-assigned pseudonym. Among these public accounts, 221, or 69% are active. More than 50% of active accounts have updated their weight log within the last seven days, and 38% within the last two days. The mean weight loss across all active accounts is 0.33 kilograms (0.73 pounds) per week, equating to a daily deficit of 359 calories. This isn't necessarily representative of people intending to reduce their weight, as the user base includes people who have already reached their chosen target weight and are using the application to maintain it, as described in the Perfect Weight Forever chapter of the book. On September 8th, the server farm processed a total of 1692 Hacker's Diet Online transactions; note that an update to a monthly log, the most common operation, generates two transactions: one for the updated log page and one for the chart image embedded in it. For the month of September to date, Hacker's Diet Online transactions are in 17th place by frequency of request to the site. The cluster file system synchronisation mechanism, after a fix for a recent hiccup, continues to run smoothly. For full details of changes to the application, visit the Development Log, which consists of extracts from the log embedded in the source code
So far, only 24 users have availed themselves of the Web badge facility. This allows the user to configure a dynamically generated image showing their current weight and trend progress (over a user-selected period ranging from one week to one year), in the user's preferred weight and energy units. The badge is automatically updated whenever the user makes a log entry, and when the badge is configured the user is provided with HTML which may be pasted into a Web page or Web log to display the badge to visitors.
Posted at
14:44
