The Robot Co-op

We’re always looking for ways to better engage the software in your head that actually changes behavior rather than just gives you a new tool or feature. The influences of peer pressure, reputation, and other social contracts are a lot more powerful as motivators than sms reminders and blinking task bars.

Along these lines, as people are creating their goals and New Year’s Resolutions, we’ve added a simple feature called the Personal Challenge.

A personal challenge is like anything else on your list of 43 things that you want to do before you die, except you give yourself a deadline and consequences. This goal then jumps to the top of your list and is highlighted with the date and consequences there for everyone to see. You can’t remove it from your list anymore… you can either mark it as done, or give up on it. You have now become accountable… and a bit of your reputation is on the line.

Choose something that you really want to do because you can only have one personal challenge at a time. For more info on motivating yourself by creating public consequences for yourself and staking your reputation on the line, you can watch this talk I gave at Ignite Seattle a few weeks ago: How to use technology to get what you want.

Try out Personal Challenges by logging in, going to your profile page, and clicking on the link in the left column to “learn more” about the brand new personal challenge and see if it doesn’t change the way you think about your goals. No more dilly-dallying.

logmerge is the tool we use to merge access log files from our web servers. As an added bonus you get a utility to quickly perform DNS lookups on the IP addresses in the log files.

Enjoy!

dev.robotcoop.com is a new site that contains some of the libraries and tools we use to make our sites go.

Just yesterday we released two libraries that help make our sites go so fast, memcache-client and cached_model!