Thanks for logging your mood! You're now logged in anonymously. That means that your moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Why not take a minute and sign up? Then you'll be able to track moods over time, send us your moods via email, SMS or Twitter, and ask for regular (or random) reminders.
Moodlog FAQ
- What's a moodlog?
- What's a mood?
- How do I enter my moods?
- What's a moment?
- What's a smiley?
- What do you mean by "strength"?
- What's an adverb?
- What's a feeler?
- How private are my moods?
- How does a mood get colored?
- Can I export my moments to CSV or XML?
- What is the level of support for this service?
- What's next?
What's a moodlog?
A moodlog records how you're feeling throughout a period in your life. Moodlog.org is a service that helps you track your moods. At any time, using email, web, SMS, or Twitter, you can send it a brief note describing how you feel. This note can be as short as "ok" or as long as you like. Later, you can come back and check the records. Maybe you'll notice some patterns.
You can also set up a schedule so Moodlog can send you an email or SMS to remind you to check in.
What's a mood?
A mood is whatever you feel like it should be. A few common moods are already programmed into moodlog.org -- happy, sad, stressed, hungry, and so on. But if you feel wacky or not bad or ferklempt or >:-&}, then go ahead and say so.
People have already mentioned 1362 distinct mood names... so far.
How do I enter my moods?
Whenever you contact moodlog.org -- through email, SMS, or a web form -- we do our best to figure out what you mean. Here's the general strategy:- If it starts with a smiley, then that's your mood, and the rest of the line (if any) is the note.
- If it's just a few words, then that's your mood, and we record it without a note.
- If it's got a hyphen (-) then everything before the hyphen is the mood, and everything after it is the note. (The hyphen must be preceded by a space. Otherwise we couldn't tell it apart from a smiley or a hyphenated mood name like 'wishy-washy'.)
- We also split off mood from note when we see certain punctuation marks, like period or comma.
- If the mood starts with an adverb or ends with a number then we use that as the strength.
- And if the mood name ends with any exclamation marks (! or !!!) then it gets strength 3.
What's a moment?
A moment records how a person (like you) is feeling at a particular date and time. It comprises a mood, a strength, and an optional note which lets you describe in more detail how you feel or why you feel that way. Moodlog keeps track of all your moods and lets you analyze trends across time.
By aggregating many moments from many people, moodlog.org will someday be able to calculate the world mood (not yet implemented).
What's a smiley?
A smiley, also known as an emoticon, is a short burst of punctuation marks that expresses your mood. Here's a list of some common smileys::-) | Happy |
:-( | Sad |
:-| | Neutral |
:-D | Excited |
:-o | Bored |
:'( | Crying |
:*) | Drunk |
:-! | Angry |
:-@ | Stressed |
Although smileys have common definitions, Moodlog considers them distinct, so ":-)" is technically a different mood than "happy" or "good". (In the future we hope to add some sort of relationship between different moods, though, to get clusters of similar feelings.)
What do you mean by "strength"?
Strength is just an approximation on a scale from one ("slightly") to three ("very") of how intensely you're feeling a certain mood at a certain moment. If you don't specify a strength, then we assume it's a two ("moderately").
Why such a simplified scale? Well, it seems that if you give people a lot of options, they tend to cluster into three groups anyway -- weak, moderate, and strong. Any further variation just adds complication and stress without providing much added statistical validity. Note that there is no "zero" on the scale -- if you're not feeling a certain way, then don't send it!
[Thoughts: We may want to do 1-5 instead of 1-3, to add "very weak" and "very strong". And we may want to allow zero, to support the use case that there's a particular mood you want to track the absence of as well as the presence of (like, say, anxiety). How do you feel about that?]
What's an adverb?
An adverb modifies a verb, an adjective, or in this case, a mood name. We support the following adverbs:- Strength 1: "a little", "kind of", "not very", "mildly", "slightly", "a bit"
- Strength 3: "very", "super", "way", "quite", "deeply", "totally", "really"
What's a feeler?
A feeler is a message, from Moodlog to you, asking you how you feel. It can be sent to any of your registered email or SMS addresses.
Currently you have to send yourself a feeler by clicking the "Send Feeler Now" button. Soon you will be able to set up automatic feelers so Moodlog can interrupt you at various times throughout the day.
Once you've received a feeler, you can reply to it as many times as you like. So to start logging moods from your mobile phone, send it a feeler, and hold on to the message.
How private are my moods?
Good question. We are trying to put in reasonable data security protocols, but for the time being, while we're in alpha, don't put anything in here that you wouldn't want your mother (or Alex) to see. Eventually we will have proper security, possibly including encryption. But one of the main ideas for this site is the synthesis of the personal -- and let's face it, how you're feeling is, at times, the most personal of information -- and the shared. We hope to get a database of moods, how they relate to each other, what people call them and even how the world is feeling at any moment in time. But we don't want to reveal anything personally identifiable while compiling this cool data set, even to your friends and family, unless you give explicit consent.
We welcome input and feedback on this topic and will actively monitor the forums, once we have them.
How does a mood get colored?
Express yourself! If you're feeling blue, or if you're seeing red, let Moodlog see through your rose-colored glasses!
- Click on a mood's name to set its color. (Keep on clicking until you see the cool circular color selector widget.)
- If you check the 'use consensus' box, then you'll see the average value for all the people who have set a color on that mood. (We use a linear average across HSL space. If you want to know what the heck that means, drop me a line.)
- You also see the consensus color if you don't specify a color for a given mood... or nothing (white) if nobody in the system has set a color for that mood yet.
What is the color of 'hungry?' Finally the world will know.
Can I export my moments to CSV or XML?
Yes! On top of the Moments list are two links, [XML] and [CSV] that output your moments in the data format of your choice.
If you write any scripts that rely on this, please drop me a line so I can let you know if the format changes.
What is the level of support for this service?
At this stage, Moodlog is an alpha application. That means that the UI and functionality may change without warning, and your data may not be safe or secure (though we will do our best to protect it).
You have been warned! :-)
Soon we will add database backups and that sort of thing.
What's next?
Here are a few of the features I'd like to add real soon now:- scheduled or random feelers -- DONE!
- graphs of your moods over time
- 'mood map' spreading moods over two axes (positive/negative affect and high/low arousal)
- validation for all your email addresses, not just the first one
- per-user time zone support -- DONE!
- twitter integration
- Satisfaction site -- DONE!
- and of course... MoodBlog!