Since it’s called Health Month and it starts on the 1st of every month, I’m trying to get a few people in to help me test it out during August.  This gives me about 3 days to finish off the MUST HAVE features and to hopefully find a few people who are willing to not only test out a new idea, but to do it with an unfinished tool.

I made a list of features that still need to be done:

1. game manual / dictionary
2. Twitter/Facebook posting (and fruit)
3. Facebook liking of things
4. buying sponsorship chips
5. Amazon payments
6. design the daily emails
7. show everyone who’s playing during a given month
8. profile pages
9. track your meals
10. mobile version
11. import and display recent tweets from previous day to help you remember what you did
12. import local weather
13. get user’s location
14. post game report
15. sponsored invites
16. make healings and other events trigger notes on the game wall
17. more illustrations

Of those, I think mostly #1 (game manual) and #8 (profile pages) need to be done.  So that’s what I’m going to be working on these next 2 days.  I’ll be emailing people that signed up on healthmonth.com in 3 days hopefully.  If you’re particularly interested and capable of playing this game in August, say so in the comments (you can also re-submit the email address with additional notes if you want).

I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but in case you missed it, I posted a short explanation of my project.  Here it is:

http://healthmonth.com

It’s been fun hearing a few reactions.  It’s all just words though… the real test will be the implementation, which is slowly but surely coming along.

The part of building websites that I dread, account management, sign in, log in, authentication, etc, has gotten a lot more interesting in the last few years.  Mostly because of all of the options for logging in via other site credentials.  OAuth, Open ID, Facebook Connect, etc.  I’ve done Open ID and Facebook Connect before, but this time around I thought that OAuth might be the best suited.  Because, even though being able to log in without creating a new account is pretty interesting, I’m more interested in getting data from the other sites than in just simplifying log in.  OAuth is good because it often gives you access to the APIs of these sites in addition to being a method of authentication.

It took me a while to wrap my head around the basics, but once I got it working for Twitter, Tumblr was no problem.  And even though Facebook has its own implementation of “OAuth 2.0″, that proved to be the most elegant implementation I’ve yet seen, and was actually a lot easier than the others.  I’m so glad I gave up on the Javascript API that Facebook offers.  It’s meant to make things simpler, but I think it’s actually a lot more fragile and complicated than the OAuth authentication options.

I also implemented Foursquare pretty easily.  And Google Contacts… but then I disabled it because I think that’s not quite the same as the rest.

Even though Flickr doesn’t use OAuth, they use something that works pretty similar, so even though I’ve had trouble getting their authentication system to work in the past, this time it was really no problem.  I think the whole series of steps of requesting a token, getting another token, and then verifying that token makes sense to me now.  Only took me about 5 years to click.

I am not just adding these sites for kicks.  There are actually a few things that I think can be improved in the whole “connect your sites up” world, which I’m excited to implement.  One thing, for example, that I don’t see many sites doing is allowing you to “auto-follow” people that you have added over time.  Or, at least, letting you know that another of your friends has joined the site since you imported Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

I’ve got another big part of the site to figure out today.  The game wall.  After you fill in your day’s work, the primary next step is to see stats and charts about your progress in the game and in the month, and the secondary step is to see how you are doing compared to others.  The secondary step is what I’m going to start working on today.

Good will is a valuable thing.

Somehow, in our brains, we know exactly how much good will we have towards any number of things.  Our wife, our baby, our job, people who walk slow, rain, people who are always late, people who drive you to the airport, people who hang out with you with no notice, our parents, our computer, AT&T, etc.

It would be interesting to investigate just how we are able to have completely different amounts of good will towards all of these things without it seeming contradictory to ourselves.  How is it possible to have so little good will for a long line at the post office while having so much good will for the person who saves our spot for us while we run to get a coffee?  It goes deep into our old brains’ sense of fairness, justice, manners, and what’s right and wrong.  An early feature of our cerebral cortex, most likely.

I’m now 4 weeks in to my 90 day challenge.  About 1/3rd of the way done.  Yikes.

Progress report.

1. I’ve fallen in love with heroku.com, and think that I’ll be using them to host the site once it launches.
2. My sleeping patterns are still a little out of wonk. Yesterday for example, I just couldn’t seem to shake that “I need a nap” feeling.  And combine that with some difficult problems I’m trying to solve and my brain sort of feels like a stale rubber band.  I think it’s more work-related than baby-related, strangely.
3. I’ve also fallen in love with highcharts.com when it comes to making pretty charts.  I might still use jqplots as well, but I think highcharts is actually quite a bit more powerful.
4. I’ve sort of solidified my idea pattern for now
   1. A game every month
   2. Minimal design, but colorful
   3. Not necessarily free
   4. Choose your own adventure beforehand
      1. Bet yourself, punish yourself
   5. Play with others
   6. Be sorted onto a semi-arbitrary “team” of people like you
   7. A day is 1 turn
   8. Minimal amount of “work” per turn
   9. Points awarded daily
   10. Points not entirely explained, or based on a semi-complex algorithm
   11. Pretty charts and stats as a reward for daily participation
   12. Semi-frivolous award system for good behavior
   13. Streaks are a central part of the game’s motivation
   14. Some sense of a “meta” game that spans months
5. I’d say I’m about 1/2 way done with the core functionality of the site.  Maybe a little more.  But there are always a lot of little things at the end that need to be figured out.  I’m looking forward to those too.
6. Sometimes I do have that fear, “what if this flops?”  Luckily it’s not an all-or-nothing kind of proposition.  But I’m still not sure that my basic premise is compelling enough to really make a splash.  One comfort is that the basic premise unlocks more premises that I can build on if the primary one isn’t enough by itself.
7. I’ve got to figure out a way to balance home life, work life, and health.  I’ve got a way to get about 4-5 hours of work in a day, which is pretty good if I can make it all productive work, but it has come at the cost of me doing any sort of exercise.  And I can feel my body sort of wasting away and creating pools of unused physical energy that then make me restless and feel gross.  I’m going to go on a run today, instead of working.  It is the weekend after all.

I’m building this health site kinda thing. It’s funny because I’ve somehow become interested in the world of health and fitness. When we started 43 Things, I would often answer the question, “where do you work” with something along the lines of “at a self-help internet company”. I liked that answer because it got to the heart of what our goals were, while also sort of taking the asker off guard. Because being involved in the self-help market is sort of like saying “I’m a Scientologist.”

Health and fitness, dieting, and that whole market is not quite as sketchy as the self-help market, but I think it’s definitely related. There are about 3.8 billion diet plans, ways to lose weight fast, ways to be healthy without actually being healthy, etc. There are a few nice and simple health and diet plans out there, like the Hacker’s Diet and the Primal Blueprint, but even they sort of alienate a lot of their audience by trying to appeal too much to a certain smaller audience. Which, I guess I wouldn’t notice as much if I was actually in their target audience.  And, most likely, anything I create will be yet another small audience kind of deal, but as far as I know there isn’t one for people like me, people who are sort of into Nike+ and sometimes into weird fasting diets and sometimes into extreme rule-making for short periods of time and sometimes into giving up something for Lent, but really pretty unmotivated to go much beyond that.  Even though I do intellectually know that health is a fairly important thing.

What motivates me?  Competitions, social connections, challenges, easy things, pretty things, simple things, cheap things, things without a ton of ads, things that are easy to understand, things that don’t make me shiver with sketchiness, things that work with technology, things that my friends like, things that don’t seem like a scam, things that have some scientific and common-sense backing.

When it comes down to it, health is easy.  Michael Pollan’s Food Rules sum it up, mostly.  They really aren’t rules as much as anecdotes about food.  Eat real food, exercise, don’t get too stressed out.

The problem, of course, isn’t knowing the rules, it’s following them.  It’s motivation.  And that’s where I think I can help, because the Internet, and social games, provide nothing if not a ton of motivation to do things.  Most of the time, we’re motivated to do things that have no bearing on our health, or that harm it.  But what if you applied the same addicting methods that make us check our Twitter and Facebook feeds 982 times a day to eating real food, exercising, and not getting stressed out?

Anyway, that’s what my brain sounds like lately.

I’ve now got the basic structure of the health game figured out.  And the rules.  And the signup page.  And the part where you make bets and promises with yourself.  And the part where you can sponsor people.  And the part where you can learn something about yourself based on the kind of rules you chose and how difficult you think they are and how important you think they are.  And there are spirit animals involved that help you along the way, well 3 spirit animals and one sort of anti-spirit animal sort of modeled after Steven Pressfield’s Resistance.  The Lizard Brain.  And there are wild cards, and ways to track your progress, and share your progress, and now I just need to get working on the Encyclopedia.  After that, I’ve got to work on the actual game itself.  How you play it once the game starts.  That’s going to be a big chunk of my remaining work and I’m excited about it.