The Hacker’s Diet - A WordPress Weight Loss Plugin
This is the very first public release of my WordPress plugin based off John Walker’s book The Hacker’s Diet. The version of this release is 0.9 beta. It is compatible with WordPress versions 2.0.x or higher.
What is it?
The Hacker’s Diet is a plugin which you can use to input your weight everyday for calculating and tracking your weight trend based off the guidance and formulas used in the book, The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker.
Why did I write this?
So last August I noticed something. That “something” was that I couldn’t button my pants because my gut was too big. So I was faced with a decision: either buy new pants or lose weight. Now that I think about it, I guess this all started due to the fact that I hate shopping! Either way, I began to look into weight loss systems. I thought things like Atkin’s and South Beach were just gimmicks, so I dug deeper. Then I found The Hacker’s Diet, written by the founder of Autodesk (creator of AutoCAD). It was written by a nerd, for nerds, and it really inspired me. The first paragraghs of his book sum up the whole concept of weight loss very succinctly.
There’s an old Wall Street tale: a tyro asks an old-timer, “How do you make money in the market.” The wise man answers, “Nothing could be simpler: buy low, sell high.” The beginner asks, “How can I learn to do that?” The sage responds, “Ahhhh…that takes a lifetime.” Simple doesn’t mean easy.
There is no magic secret to losing weight and keeping it off, just as there is no hidden key to instant wealth. Nonetheless, every year another crop of “magic diet” and “secrets of investing” books appear on already-creaking shelves. The human capacity to ignore inconvenient facts and avoid unpleasantness is immense. Success in any endeavour requires coming to terms with the true nature of the task at hand and, if the goal is worth the effort, getting on with it.
“How can I lose weight?” “Simple, eat less food than your body burns.” “How can I learn to do that?” Read this book.
There was one problem, to me, with his system. Since it was originally written in 1991, you had two choices for tracking your progress: pen and paper (what is this, the stone age?) and Excel spreadsheets. I found the spreadsheets extremely lacking, and I thought to myself “Man, I wish there was a cooler web-based version of this.” And with that, this plugin was born.
The plugin
This plugin serves one primary purpose: to replace the original spreadsheet’s functionality while increasing usability. Here is the current (simple) feature list:
- Dashboard integration
- Flickr-style “edit in place” daily weight entry
- Weight trend calculation
- Reporting (weight vs. trend vs. goal)
- Reads custom RSS feed for notifications of plugin updates
I have been personally using this plugin in my WordPress install for the past 5 months, and I have decided to publically release it the same day that I hit my weight goal. (Go me!) The development process has been very iterative. I first wrote the bare minimum needed to replace the weight logging part of the system’s spreadsheets, and then over the past 5 months have added features to either recreate functionality of the original spreadsheets, or add cool stuff as I saw fit. :)
But to be honest, I really haven’t touched the code in about 3 months since it was stable and did everything I needed. Recently I’ve worked on some things that were on my “todo” list, and I now feel that the plugin is ready for public use.
Download
hackersdiet_0.9b.zip Current version: Download from Wordpress.org Plugin Repository
Screens:
Enjoy!
