stardate

stardate was originally called ActiveBudget. It used to just track income/expenses and hourly work. I stopped working hourly, so I removed that section and added a microblogging element. It’ll archive your twitter feed and keep track of how much you run. The goal of stardate is to pretty much archive my life.

Running it

I’m not offering a hosted version of stardate. So you’ll want to install it yourself and figure out a hosting solution (I recommend passenger + mysql, but whatever floats your boat). There are some gem dependencies, but you can install those with:

  sudo rake gems:install

I haven’t implemented a sign up screen (mostly because I don’t want people signing up on my hosted version), so you’ll have to create your user account via the console (+script/console+)

  user = User.create :email=>'your@emailhere.com', :password=>'password', :password_confirmation=>'password_confirmation'

Using it

99% of the time I just use the stardate homepage. There is an input bar at the top. Whatever you put in is fed into the parser and turned into some archival element. Right now it tracks:

Items - These are transactions. Like you give someone money, or they give it to you. Values are assumed to be negative unless you specify a plus sign.

Note - This is just a small blog entry. If you’d like to note the time you did something or other, just type it in et voila.

Run - Do some exercise? Use the key word ‘run’ and then input a number of miles and a number of minutes.

To learn more about how things are input, just look at +grammer.rb+ or the grammer specs. Any of the element types can be proceeded with a date value. Items are the trickiest input. The format is thus: 1/1/09 $100 Vendor - Some description [tag, tag]

The Display

The first graph is your income vs. expense. The second graph is run mileage per day as a bar and pace as a line graph. The tally in the upper right corner is your income/expense over the specified period. Blue is good, pink is bad.

Recurring

If you’d like an item to recur on a monthly basis, create a recurring. You’ll need to trigger a rake task once a day:

  rake recur

If you set a recurring date to a day that doesn’t exist in a given month, it’ll run on the last day of the month.

Twitter archive

Input your twitter username and password. Then run a rake task to import your tweets:

  rake update:twitter

Budgeting

Budgeting is stupid. Just spend less than you make.

Author

• stardate was created by Jordan McKible jordan.mckible.com
• Available on GitHub at github.com/jmckible/stardate