Post (and link to) a glossary
Beeminder uses a number of neologisms and uncommon words, and it would be handy and helpful if they were defined somewhere that was easy to find. This would be especially helpful for newbies but probably occasionally useful for more experienced users as well.
A few examples:
- yellow brick road (partly explained in graph legend, but the basic concept is not described there)
- akrasia horizon
- akrasia, for that matter
- derail/rerail (see below)
Actual case in point (perhaps this should be a support email but I'll leave it here for now): Right now, my "time until derailment" readout on my graph says I'm 4+ days away from derailing, which looks very wrong to me: if derailing means going off the road entirely, I should be safe indefinitely. So I tried to find the definition of derailing, in case it doesn't mean exactly what I thought, and I couldn't find the definition anywhere.
(Some of this info is in the blog, but (a) the blog isn't searchable except via Google, (b) I couldn't find anything relevant even with Google, (c) you have to know about the blog. Some of the info might also be in the introductory video — I'm going to rewatch it later — but that's no good for reference purposes.)
Glossary at http://blog.beeminder.com/glossary which we continue to keep up to date
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Matthias commented
(My edits are in purple, at least when I view it.)
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Matthias commented
Well, it's fun having engaged developers to work with on the other side, too! My inner compulsive doc writer has come out, and I've filled in some stuff on the glossary, including a few [QUESTIONS] and specific requests for info. This is, as much as anything else, an exercise for me to see how well I'm understanding what's going on, but perhaps it will also help get you guys a little closer to posting it. If someone has a chance to see if I got the gist more or less right, that would be cool.
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
Cool, thanks! Actually, feel free to contribute whether or not you're sure you understand. We'll vet it carefully before we publish it and it will be valuable for us to learn of any misunderstandings.
And thanks again for starting this thread! It's seriously inspiring having this kind of engaged user community.
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Matthias commented
Awesome! Thanks for the explanation about the derailing countdown — that was exactly my misunderstanding. The draft jargon page looks perfect. I'll try to contribute something to it (for the ones I'm sure I understand!) if I can find the time.
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
Hear hear! We've been meaning to make a glossary and have been brainstorming things to include. Here's what we have so far: http://expost.padm.us/jargon And for any of our hardcore fans who want to help us fill that out, you can edit it here: http://padm.us/jargon
I'll add the definition of derailing now in order to answer your question. Actually, I think the definition is what you expect but the countdown is confusing in some cases, like weight loss. Since the width of the road can change as long as you're in the right lane, we're conservative and count down to when you're in the wrong lane in that case. We need to at least change the text to be clear about that. Thanks for nudging us on this!