Walker Tracker Blog

It’s my pleasure to introduce Robin Jennings:

Robin will be joining Walker Tracker to help energize this blog, among many other things. Robin is a writer, traveler and parent, and it’s going to be great having her help. She’s been a long-time walker, but she’s new to pedometers – so drop on by and give her a warm welcome. In the meantime, watch this space for some new posts on walking and walking communities. If you have a particular interest related to walking you’d like to see talked about here – let Robin know!

@Robin on Walker Tracker

I guess this is why weekdays feel like weak days (harr harr). My chart over the last 30 days is even more pronounced. I’m definitely in a winter lull, but Mondays seem especially hard. Knowing this – I’m going to work some schedule changes into Monday.

Charts by day-of-the-week now in your Graphs area!

Also, Walker Tracker has a small CafePress store now too, if you feel like showing your WT colors.

Here are a couple of new features:

There are now group widgets, so if you have your own website or blog you can post a widget of your group’s progress. Go to your group and click on the ‘Widget’ link in the sub navigation. Note: Your group administrators will have to enable the widget for it to work.

Post your steps to Facebook

Facebook Connect is now implemented (at least barebones – likely more to come, here). If you post your steps, you’ll see a button that will allow you to post your daily step count/blog post/picture to your Facebook feed if you have a facebook account. Turn this off here if you wish.

Also: Happy Inauguration and New Year. Here’s to another great year of walking.

Ben

We keep track of metrics around here – it’s part of what we do – and we hit a couple of nice ones recently.

October 3rd marked crossing 3 billion collective steps. Now, that’s a long way from the 700 billion needed for the bailout – but were steps = dollars, we’d all be doing rather nicely! And indeed, I would claim that we’re all a bit better off for it.

Also in the last week we posted a record number of steps per day – 10,000,000. Ten million steps in a single day! Go Walker Tracker walkers! The walker who crossed the three billion step mark got a Walker Tracker Pro membership.

Of course – the best solution for running a wellness program with your organization is to get a Walker Tracker Private Level.

However, it’s certainly possible to run a successful walking program for your organization using the Walker Tracker community site. 

Here are a few tips if you wish to do so:

• Register yourself first
• On the lower right hand column there’s a box that says ‘invite a friend to Walker Tracker‘
• Go there and copy the ‘invite link’. Use that link to invite everyone in your organization. That way you’ll be able to see who signs up and when via the ‘View your invitees‘ page 

This will allow you to corral and track signups that are part of your organization.

Once everyone is signed up, remember that:

• You can create private groups (you’ll need to invite all those users to this group)
• You can create private competitions. Note that you can create a competition as private – play around with it to get it just as you want it – and then make it public.

If later you decide you need the extra privacy, administrative controls, branding and statistics that a private level affords, no worries! We can help migrate your users to your own program.

We added a few new features this weekend:

Competitions administration - for fine-tuning your walking competitions.

Group autolinking – add a pound sign in front of your group sign, ie #portlanders – similar to how you refer to usernames via the @username syntax. These two bits were borrowed from Twitter – great stuff.

Details in the forum

Also, we’ve added a new type of competition – Goal Challenge on Step averages. 

There are essentially two main types of competitions:

Goal challenges challenge everyone to strive for a certain goal – such as walking 100,000 steps in a week, or keeping an average above 8,000 for the month. Everyone who meets this goal ‘wins’.

Normal competitions have only one winner, whether it’s a group or an individual.

Details are here

Cheers,

Ben

We’re building a robust administration area for our private level administrators. I thought I’d share a few screenshots. The administrative interface has a fairly bare-bones look to it currently, but I’m excited about how far it’s come along and how powerful it is already.

As always, if you or your organization is interested in a private level – let’s talk!

(click on any picture to enlarge it)

Walker stevemac entered in the 2 Billionth Step yesterday (el Cinco de Mayo!) on Walker Tracker.

As a thank you, stevemac received a Lifetime Pro membership to Walker Tracker. When I congratulated him, he said:

“I’m part of a Project Team that is participating in a step challenge.  Our group is called CNRL EIT and we have multiple teams and monthly prizes at our team meetings.  We started as a group in February.

It’s been a fantastic health initiative for our team and a lot of competitive fun.  I’ve never seen everyone here walk so much.  Seems most of us are doing “walking” meetings now.”

Congrats on all that walking, everyone!

Walker Tracker has teamed up with getDowntown, a program of the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, to create a private walking community on Walker Tracker for Ann Arbor, Michigan residents. The private level will be used to celebrate and promote Curb Your Car Month! We’re overjoyed to be part of such a great program. 

Considering that Prevention Magazine just voted Ann Arbor the 3rd most walkable city in the US this certainly seems like a perfect fit.  

The Ann Arbor development community is giving away 30 free pedometers, first come first serve, so stop by the getDowntown Blog to learn more about the Ann Arbor/ Walker Tracker contest.

note: If you’re an Ann Arbor resident and you’re already on Walker Tracker drop us a line for your options.

Interested in private levels for your organization or community? Let us know.

I whipped up a quick example of using the Walker Tracker API together with the Google Charts API to draw a nifty looking chart.

The Google Charts API, while a teensy bit limited, is very cool. You can probably expect to see a little more of it here.

(not saying my step counts are awesome… unfortunately)

Have a look at the Walker Tracker API Example