Reimplementing the iDoneThis memory service

Photography by wadem, CC-BY-SA

There's an excellent website called iDoneThis.com, which implements the most simple yet brilliant of services. Every day, you record the list of things you've done, and it gives you a check-mark for that day. This was motivating in two ways: firstly, the desire to keep that chain of check-marks running (what's known as a 'chain calendar' or a 'Seinfeld calendar'), and secondly by emailing you your memories of what you were doing a year (or a week, or a month) ago.

For me, knowing what I was doing a year ago was really good. I loved waking up each morning to be reminding of something I might otherwise not think of again. The good memories I was emailed would make me feel good again, and bad memories? Well, they'd often make me feel good that I wasn't going through that anymore, or they'd be insightful if I was encountering similar issues now.

I loved the memory service, and so did my friends, even if they didn't use it. I'd often send them messages about what awesome adventures we were up to a year ago, and that would often make their day.

Unfortunately, a few months ago, iDoneThis discontinued their memory-posting service. I don't know why; I can only assume they're focusing on the more corporate part of their service, and the network costs of all the personal emails wasn't worth it.

Today, as part of a productivity spiral, I reimplemented the old memories service. The code isn't pretty—unfortunately iDoneThis doesn't (yet) provide an API—but I have a bot that can log-in and fetch a day's worth of data.  Best of all, that code is open source, and available from the CPAN, so you can download and use it yourself.


If you're not a Perl person, then it's pretty easy to install.  Simply follow my world's simplest guide to installing cpanm.

Now just install the WebService::Idonethis module:

cpanm WebService::Idonethis

To use it, you'll first need to create a ~/.idonethisrc file with your auth details:

[auth]
user=someuser
pass=somepass

If all has gone well, you can now use the idonethis-memories command!

$ idonethis-memories

Here's what you were doing on 2012-02-11:

* Built a robotic dinosaur with lasers with Claudine.
* Played stepmania with Deanna (Spice Girls rock!)
* Invoiced ALL the clients.
* Drank six billion cups of coffee.

It's perfect for putting into a cron job.

Edit: As of v0.03, you can now submit done items directly from the command line using the idone tool:

$ idone "Read a great blog by Paul Fenwick"

Edit: As of v0.04, you can also get a list of what you've done today:

$ idone -l

* Flossed my teeth
* Looked at pictures of cats on the Internet
* Defended against a goblin siege in Dwarf Fortress

If you're handy with Perl, or just want to look at the code, there's a github repository. Patches are extremely welcome!

Edit: As of v0.08, the idone -lc command is the best thing ever.  It will list the things you've done today, and allow you to add new things by entering them on stdin.  It also has less than a third of the previous dependencies.