1000 Push Up Challenge
So, this morning I was feeling incredibly motivated and decided to do 1000 push ups and build out a one page site to broadcast the adventure. I figured I would be more motivated to do it if people knew what I was doing and I invested a little time into it beforehand. And it turned into a fun little 45 minute project and I thought I’d share about it here.
First off, the social interaction. No modern website is complete without it. I went the easy way out and used facebook’s comment box. I love how easy they made that. Of course, there is also the like button. It seemed like a must.
What was more interesting was the push up tracker. I didn’t feel like pulling out MySQL this time. I was working with a time constraint, this page wasn’t already on top of a framework and I didn’t want it to be and I really didn’t want to be adding rows to the database by hand. I’ve been addicted to Google Spreadsheets lately, so I did a quick search, looking for a way to pull JSON data out of it.
As it turns out, my three minute search didn’t turn up any quick and easy way of getting JSON. However, CSV is a snap to get. All you have to do is go to the Publish settings and it will guide you thru getting whatever CSV data out of it you want. Tossed in a PHP script to parse the CSV, turned it into JSON, sprinkle on some jQuery plus a ten second timer and voila! Self updating push up dashboard.
Fun morning project to start my day off. Now, I need to dig into Lemonstand and start knocking out those pushups!
