News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Do you have a smart system/method to track things... by blackbear_ on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @03:06PM (#34418062)
I wrote a Telegram bot to save messages into a Google Spreadsheet [1], with some sime parsing rules to split the text into columns (essentially, #hashtags for column names and everything in between as content). The idea is then to use pivot tables and other spreadsheet goodies to aggregate, summarize and report data.

I mainly use it to track expenses and random thoughts or links.

The bot's username is @gsheet_notes_bot, feedback and suggestions are welcome :)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TelegramBots/comments/wqkpm7/your_m...

Re:Ask HN: Do you have a smart system/method to track things... by ramn7 on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @03:19PM (#34418299)
Super cool tool!

Are you thinking of a way to automate the actual tracking? Do you find it a hassle to do manually? (this is the main thing I was trying to solve, check out https://www.t12n.io )

Re:Ask HN: Do you have a smart system/method to track things... by blackbear_ on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @03:41PM (#34418665)
Neat idea and great website!

I thought about having some periodic reminders, maybe using something in the spreadsheet (e.g. columns) as prompts or questions to be answered, but have not implemented anything yet. I am pretty disciplined myself so I rarely forget to write down an expense after I put my wallet away, but I can totally see that this is be a pain point for some users.

I could add a feature like that, but I do not really have lots of users to get feedback from, yet. I am currently in the "tell people" stage after I "did things" [1], so I should probably try to make a landing page as cool as yours ;)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30193714#30219978

Re:Ask HN: Do you have a smart system/method to track things... by ramn7 on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @04:02PM (#34419062)
Sounds good, best of luck!! Thanks the reference and the nice words!