Three New Features at The Daily Plate!
Greetings from the staff here at The Daily Plate! We hope you’re doing well in your ongoing quest to eat smarter. Here are a few quick updates on some new features we’ve launched recently:
1. Improvements to Meals!
A few weeks ago, we asked you what feature you’d most like us to work on next. The response was overwhelming; you wanted improvements to the Meals feature on the site! And we’ve done just that: Now when you track a meal on your MyPlate page, the entire meal is condensed into one line. (You can still expand that meal to see all the items that are in it, of course!) This is just the first of several improvements to Meals we plan on making in the coming weeks, but this was by far the most popular feature request for the site.
2. Groups!
We are thrilled to unveil this feature! Groups are a great you can share your progress with others who share your motivations and diet strategies. Anyone can create a group at The Daily Plate, and you can make it public for anyone to join, or private and limited to a selected group of friends/family members whom you invite. Here are some of the great things you can do with groups:
• Track everyone’s nutritional totals on a day-by-day basis, to help motivate each other!
• Group creators (and others they “promote”) can create blog posts visible to all group members.
• Anyone in the group can comment on those blog posts, to get a real dialog going!
We imagine there will be groups for different dieting strategies (Atkin’s, South Beach, etc), families who are all working together playing their own version of “The Biggest Loser,” protein lovers, fitness gurus, and more — but that’s really up to YOU! In fact, we can’t wait to see what you came up with.
So, take a look at Groups and let us know what you think. And again, this is just Phase 1; we have plenty more up our sleeves for this feature!
3. Messaging!
We know many of you are finding an added benefit on our site: You’re making friends with people who share your weight-loss goals! Now, in addition to talking to people on the message boards and sharing with them in our new Groups, we’ve made it even easier to exchange messages with them, right on the site! With on-site messaging, you can write privately and directly to other members you meet — it’s a great way to keep in touch!
As always, we love hearing from you. Please feel free to share your feedback on The Daily Special, our official blog, or on our message boards. Stay tuned for more great features in the coming weeks!
Yours in smarter eating,
The Daily Plate team
lighthouse said,
March 8, 2007 @ 4:16 pm
Thank you so much for all of the wonderful additions! I really appreciate the work the TDP team is doing!!!
Zot said,
March 8, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
Kudos on the new features! I’d like to suggest one more.
Have you considered making RSS feeds for the MyPlate section? People who already have blogs could place the RSS feed on their site, so friends and other curious visitors would know what they’re eating. Twitter.com is a hot site right now for people to casually keep tabs on what their friends are up to, and knowing what your friends are eating is almost like being able to sit down and eat with them. TheDailyPlate.com could be the Twitter of food.
Anyway, hope you’ll think about it. Keep up the good work!
Lex said,
March 8, 2007 @ 5:21 pm
Thanks lighthouse and Zot!
Zot, we actually have the feature you’re after already! If you go to your diary page (http://www.thedailyplate.com/diary/), you can grab an RSS feed for your personal MyPlate history.
Let me know if you need more info on this!
Zot said,
March 8, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
D’oh! Thanks, Lex. I hadn’t made my profile public yet, so the link to the RSS feed wasn’t displayed. The raw feed contains a little more info than I need — ideally, I’d love a mini-feed that fit in a sidebar and just listed my past 10 or so foods, and perhaps their calories. I know you folks have a lot on your… plates… right now, so no rush. I just like the idea of being able to see what my friends are eating, and this seems like a great way to do it. Thanks for the help!
CieloBacio said,
April 1, 2007 @ 12:41 pm
Hey guys! I totally love this site, its amazing and SO helpful!!! The one thing I would love to see is fixing the exercise tracker so that it doesn’t deduct the calories burned from the calories for the day. Maybe thats just my own little quirk though? I think it would be a great help! Thanks a bunch!
Vikki Cheeks
lisyemarie said,
April 21, 2007 @ 7:43 am
Hi… I am a fairly new member, was wondering if you ever thought about chat rooms?
Lex said,
May 2, 2007 @ 10:24 am
Hi Liseymarie — as you know, we have now launched a Gold-member chat room:
http://www.thedailyplate.com/chat/