i want your basic web interface that looks “familiar” and “comfortable”, that is, i do want users to more/less know what to do upon coming to the training log the first time, because it looks at least vaguely familiar to other training logs. i also want it to be sufficiently intuitive so that people who’ve never used an online training log before.
i need for athletes and their coaches to be able to input projected workouts, and then for athletes to be able to input their actual workouts. i do not know how to confront the issue of how it is coaches access the athlete’s log. does the athlete simply give his coach his user/pass? i don’t know. suggestions solicited.
user/pass: obviously, the athlete must be able to create an account. but, user/pass is not necessary per se, in that it’s already been done (the forum user/pass handshakes with the training log, and logs in the athlete. i can imagine our existing developers tying in this forum user/pass to the training log, that is, perhaps training log developers do not need to worry about farting around with this element of the application.
fields: i’d like the athlete to enter his data in the following fields:
A. event (swim, bike, run)
B. time of day
C. distance
D. time (how many minutes or hours it took to do the workout)
E. RPE score (a legend will be made available to users allowing them to easily assess what score to apply to the workout).
feedback: i’d like the athlete to be able to call up his workouts, either backward or forward chronologically, based on a date range, or a specific month, or number of months (whatever is most customary).
that’s the end of “Phase I”. Phase II is the sausage factory: how we grind the data. this is where i suspect our training log will set itself apart. i don’t think the data is manipulated in ways especially helpful to triathletes at the moment. i think we can do better. but, it’s Phase I i’m interested in at the moment.
i can have Phase I executed in one of two ways. this is more or less factory work, and i know that. it’s the exceptional person who’d take this on on a voluntary basis. that said, if there are takers, i’m all ears. but i need it quick. two weeks. three weeks something like that. is it a new tri bike you’re looking for? a new set of race wheels? what floats your boat? if it comes down to it, i’ll just write a check. what i want for Phase I is a developer who’ll spend some serious time, who has the serious time to spend, and who’ll roll up his sleeves and go. if that’s you, email or PM me and tell me what you’re looking for.
just remember that it’s got to interface with our existing linux servers and mysql data.
GoalTable
UserKey INT,
Date datetime,
GoalTime time,
ActualRaceTime time.
.
A good data design at the start saves many projects later.
Usually we brainstorm this with the customer then add our ‘tribal’ knowledge to whatever the customer has asked for. Tribal knowledge being stuff I know from experience.
Can we throw Frank Day a bone, and have a field regarding whether Power Cranks were used? I feel that could do a lot to settle some on going debates here.
i need for athletes and their coaches to be able to input projected workouts, and then for athletes to be able to input their actual workouts. i do not know how to confront the issue of how it is coaches access the athlete’s log. does the athlete simply give his coach his user/pass? i don’t know. suggestions solicited.
user/pass: obviously, the athlete must be able to create an account. but, user/pass is not necessary per se, in that it’s already been done (the forum user/pass handshakes with the training log, and logs in the athlete. i can imagine our existing developers tying in this forum user/pass to the training log, that is, perhaps training log developers do not need to worry about farting around with this element of the application.
At the lab where I work, we have a flexible system of user privileges for access to our database of neuroimaging data. This is required for a variety of legal/privacy/political concerns, and the designated owner of each file can assign different access privileges for different users.
With respect to your goals, there is no reason why you can’t have privileges set up to give you many-to-many access rights. In other words, a coach should be able to view multiple athletes’ data without logging in separately, and an athlete should be able to have more than one coach. Once the coach has logged in, the system should be able to provide the appropriate links to his or her clients without having to log-in separately each time.
Now, how to do it with your set-up… I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader :). We have database and web programmers who have worked these things out for us.
I am not a developer but negotiate software development and license agreements for a major tech company. I didn’t really see any commentary on IP rights. Keep in mind individual works of authorship are generally protected by copyright law whether registered or not. You may wish to consider under which terms/conditions you accept and host apps developed by outside parties. I suppose you could accept apps under a public license (such as GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc) or make clear such development works become property of ST. Just something to think about…
Reply to item 2. Have a sing up for certified coaches. The an athlete can either sign up for the log, or pick a coach to coach them. If they choose a coach then an e-mail is sent to the coach say Joe Smith has requested you coach him allowing the coach access to their log. If the athlete decides to no longer be coach, he can then remove the coach no longer allowing access to the account.
I disagree. Dan does not need to design any schemas.
What he needs to do (and has done pretty well) is describe the user experience he imagines.
When I develop something for a client, I explicitly keep anything even remotely technical out of their sight and communicate only in terms of functionality.
My question from the public forum still stands: what kind of web interface are you targeting? something useable only on a computer browser, or something that people on iphones will be able to also use? or something people on even more primitive cellphone browsers (with possibly no javascript/flash) need to be able to use? This might influence the choice of toolkit to use for the front-end side of things.
Different customers have different needs. They can decide how much technical knowledge they need but since Dan is going to own this and it’s ‘his baby’ I would think that if he doesn’t have a good idea of all data structures it won’t be a long term viable project. Since he’s apparently asking for volunteers there needs to be somebody to own it.
Of course I could be wrong and your approach may be fine but the less he knows and understands (or his designate) the less precise direction he’ll be able to provide. He may not need to know that the fields are surrogate keys or foreign keys or whatever but he’ll should understand what he’s getting.
I work with fairly large customers and have found that the customers who don’t want or can’t understand details seem to have projects with the most problems.
Perhaps Dan can chime in with his thoughts since any of us helping will take direction from him. And it could be we’re saying close to the same thing splitting hairs…
Dan is going to own this and it’s ‘his baby’ I would think that if he doesn’t have a good idea of all data structures it won’t be a long term viable project.
I don’t see why. It’s pretty routine stuff on that end (third normalized form, etc.) and it’s easy enough to change by any future developer if he’s unhappy with it.
I sent him my prop, I’m sure others have as well. I guess we’ll see what he thinks eventually.
That is really cool thinking. There are currently ZERO logging systems on line that are optimized for mobile devices.
I live on my mobile device and always appreciate sites that make it easy to access. Many auto-detect the browser type and give me quick, zippy pages that look right on my screen. Google and Amazon come to mind.
Check out Athleticore (www.athleticore.com) log which is primarily for runners but it is a no nonesense straight forward (what you see is what you get) workout log.
Actually, workoutlog.com has a mobile interface. It is very lean, but the workout data can be input and then you can go back and add details when you’re on a fat client.
Just curious why there is a “Two week” cut off on this? Seems like one would want to take the time up front and do a crap load of brainstorming and set solid ground works first before just jumping in and starting to collect data. God knows reformatting data can be a pain in the but and what happens to your data after you’ve been collecting for while then someone realizes…“It would have been nice to have this data too”?
I guess I just see this type of thing all the time. No one seems to have the time to do it right the first time but plenty of time to redo it.
