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Archive for June 29, 2006

How to improve The Daily Plate in one step: Listen to our members!

When our small staff here first started building The Daily Plate, it was really a site for ourselves; we wanted to find a way to take control of our weight and eat smarter. Now that the site is picking up steam (and users) all over the Internet, we’re getting lots and lots of user feedback — and we couldn’t be happier.

Over the past few weeks as The Daily Plate has grown in popularity, we’ve received hundreds of emails and message board posts with feature suggestions — and almost all of them are brilliant. Here are a few highlights of brand new features we implemented in the past week, based on user feedback:

1. Advanced search: Specify exactly which restaurant or brand you want to find foods from. Or, limit your search results to generic items only. And, you can even choose to only look for foods with fewer calories than a total you specify. We have plans to make advanced search even better — so stay tuned!

2. Fiber tracking: Starting this week, you can find your daily, weekly, and monthly fiber intake totals on the MyPlate calorie counter. We even offer charts to show your fiber consumption breakdown by day and over time.

3. Meals: One of our most common feature requests! Do you find yourself adding the same breakfast to your MyPlate page often? Create a meal group of any number of items you often consume together, and then you can add all of the foods to your MyPlate page with just one click! Check it out!

4. One-click food tracking: You’ve probably noticed that every single food item has a big green “I Ate This!” button on it, which you use to add the item to your MyPlate page. You may have also noticed that each time you click that button, it dynamically changes to ask you if you want to indicate that you ate the food in question today, yesterday, or some other date. But that means that when you’re tracking every day, you’d need two clicks to add an item to your MyPlate page for the day.

So, we’ve added in a pair of quick links right underneath the “I Ate This!” button, so that you can indicate you ate the food today or yesterday with just one click. We know your time is valuable and that every click counts, so we hope the power users among you will appreciate this small shortcut.

What’s next?
Our list of future features to roll out is a long one, but we’re happy to make it longer :) Add a comment here with your feature requests. We’re trying to respond quickly to popularly requested features, so if there’s something The Daily Plate is lacking, tell us, so that we can make it even better at helping you eat smarter!

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