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Health Ranker
Health Ranker - Current Health News
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Fitness Blogger
May
24
As some of you might have noticed, we’ve been having spam issues at 60 in 3. Someone is spamming the posts with various comments advertising porn sites. At last count, I have around 1000 comments in the spam queue in addition to the 100 or so that actually got through the filters and were posted. I believe I’ve gotten all the ones that have been posted and deleted them. However, if I missed any, please let me know and I’ll delete them as soon as possible.
This seems to be a continuing issue since I’ve seen another two or three spam comments come in while I was writing this message. I’m trying to figure out a better way to stop them that will not take up as much of my time and will hopefully have a solution in place by tomorrow. Until then, I thank you for your patience and hope you do not take offense at some of these comments. They certainly do not reflect my opinions or the opinions of regular 60 in 3 readers.
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Apr
16
Slight Technical Difficulties
Filed Under Announcement, Web Site | Leave a Comment
I upgraded a few of 60 in 3’s plug ins yesterday and this caused a slight issue on the site with some links to old series being broken. If you notice a broken link, please let me know. Also, if you notice any odd behavior on the site, let me know that as well.
Thank you for your patience,
Gal
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Apr
11
Review - Healthranker.com
Filed Under Research, Review, Web Site | 3 Comments
As you can see by my weekend roundups, I like reading about fitness and health news. The only problem is, where to find quality information that is well written and worth reading? I can do Google searches and that sometimes yields good stuff but it’s a bit random. I have a few newspapers which I enjoy reading online, and I sometimes link to articles in their health section, but this is a limited selection of information. I’ve tried looking on places like Digg and Reddit to see what health related articles other people are reading, but I’ve never been able to find useful things on those sites without getting lost in the incredible amount of other stuff that’s there.
So I was really interested when someone sent me a link to Health Ranker. It’s essentially a Digg style social bookmarking site but with an emphasis on health related articles. Users can submit and rank articles from any source and then subscribe to feeds which show them more articles they might be interested in. I’ve only been a user for a few days now, but I’ve already seen multiple useful articles, some of which I intend to link to in this week’s weekend roundup.
Overall, the site really does feel a lot like Digg. You can submit articles, add your approval to already submitted articles or bury articles you think do not belong. It does suffer a little from the crowd mentality of Digg in which certain articles seem more popular than others for not particular reason. However, I’ve found that the majority of the top ranked articles really do deserve their ranking.
My only complaint is the lack of a plug in that I can add to 60 in 3 to allow users to rank articles for health rankers. Right now, they only offer code which I have to enter in to every single post. So if someone from health ranker happens to read this (hint, hint) let me know if there is a way to include your ranking tool in each post automatically or if I’m just technically inept and completely missed something.
In the meantime, why don’t you head on over to Health Ranker and check it out for yourself?
NOTE - I am not affiliated with Health Ranker in any way. As usual, I only review sites and products I am personally interested in. I do not accept payment in return for reviews.
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Dec
21
Holiday Announcement
Filed Under Announcement, Web Site | Leave a Comment
My wife and I are about to leave on our vacation to Israel. I’ve convinced her that 60 in 3 is a hobby and not a job, so I’ll still be posting during our absence :) However, the normal post schedule may be a bit off. We’ll be back to our normal schedule on Jan 2nd.
Happy Holidays,
Gal
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Nov
21
I’ve been using a site called FitDay for a bit over a week now and I wanted to give you folks a review since I’m finding the site to be very useful.
FitDay is a general fitness and health site that helps you track your day to day activities, foods eaten and trends. It’s essentially an online food and activity journal with some fancy reporting. I actually tried out FitDay two years ago I believe and didn’t like it much. I guess my needs have changed since the site has remained the same and yet, I’m really liking it these days.
Home Screen
The first thing you do with FitDay is enter in some information about yourself. It’s pretty basic stuff such as gender, height and age. You also enter in a bit of information about your lifestyle. One thing to note is that you shouldn’t factor exercise into this lifestyle entry. That’s going to come later when you enter in activities. There’s also the option of making your FitDay journal public, which I’ve gone ahead and done. You can see my own FitDay journal here.
Foods Screen
Here’s where FitDay starts getting useful. The foods page is a very nice online food journal that will help you track what you eat and when you ate it. It includes a quick breakdown of where you’re getting your calories and how balanced your diet is along with all the things you ate that day. As with any food journal, there is manual work that you have to do, but FitDay makes that relatively easy.
For example, as you can see in the screenshot, I ate pumpkin pie at breakfast today. So when I try to enter that into FitDay I have a few options:
- I can search FitDay for all foods matching pumpkin pie, select the appropriate portion size and go with it. That’s the choice I usually use since FitDay has a good database of foods already entered in.
- I can browse foods until I find one I want to enter in. This isn’t as useful for meal entry but I’ve found it interesting reading.
- I can choose from foods I entered in recently. This is actually the choice I used for the pumpkin pie since I ate some of it on Tuesday too. This is just a short cut to foods you’ve searched for in the recent past, but I find it useful.
- You can enter in your own custom food. This is another great option and it works great for things like packaged food or things you buy at restaurants with posted nutritional information. Just get the information from the package or the restaurant and enter it here.
For the most part, I’ve found every food I’ve eaten in the past week relatively fast. I had to search through some options on occasion but it’s never taken more than a minute to find a food that’s relatively close to what I ate with a serving size that matches. That right there makes this a worthwhile tool since, in the past, I’ve stopped using food journals when they became too much work to maintain.
Activity Screen
Like the food screen, the activity screen is basically a fancy journal. It has the same options for searching through FitDay’s activity database, browsing activities or using activities you recently entered. It does not have the ability to enter in custom activities but I’m not sure this is a serious flaw since their activity database seems rather complete. The page also has a neat little chart that shows you where your calorie expenditure is going.
Reports Screen
If the last two screens were useful on a day to day level, then the report screen becomes more and more useful over time. All the data you collect through your journals is available here for reporting purposes. You can see where you usually spend your calories over the past month. You can see a break down of calories consumed vs. spent over the past week. You can even see a chart that shows you if you’re meeting your nutritional requirements over a certain period of time. After just a week of using this site, I’m already finding useful information in these reports. I can see how my protein consumption is going, something I’ve worried about since becoming vegetarian. I can also see how well I’m doing in my goal of going to 200lbs. So I can see these reports becoming even more useful as time goes by.
Other Screens
There are a few other screens where you can enter in goals, enter your weight and add comments in a journal format. I haven’t used them too much yet so I’m not going to go into much detail. They look neat but not as useful as the food and activity tracking and reporting.
What I like about FitDay
Easy and Quick - I’ve found FitDay to be very easy to use and very fast. I’ve always had issues with other online sites that were either too complex or too slow. FitDay seems to have the barebones I need, in a format that’s friendly and with great performance. I’ve never needed to wait for site refreshes and I’ve never sat there at a complete loss as to how to do something.
Journals - FitDay is a great journal for both food and activities. Up until now, I’ve found that tracking my food and activities over time was a hassle. There was too much work to do and I never had the right program to do it with. Because FitDay is online, I can do it anywhere and anytime. So it’s convenient. FitDay also does the tracking and analysis for me, all I need to do is enter in stuff.
Quick Nutrient Breakdown - I love the quick breakdowns in the food section. Last night I came home and felt a bit hungry. I looked at FitDay and noticed that my total calories for the day were a bit low and my total protein was also low. A quick smoothie and protein supplement later, and I was feeling full and satisfied. I don’t check FitDay before every meal, but it’s nice to know the information is available for situations like this.
Reports - If there’s one area FitDay really shines, it’s the reports. Food and activity journals are great, but the ones I did myself rarely had any sort of analysis built in. I couldn’t see any trends and this made it difficult for me to spot issues. With FitDay, I have access to reports that I’m finding very useful. Even something simple like seeing how my weight is changing over time is easy. I don’t have to graph or chart anything myself, just enter in the information whenever I get it and let FitDay do the rest.
What I Don’t Like About FitDay
BMI - First of all, FitDay insists on telling me I’m obese whenever I enter in my weight. I’m assuming this is based on a BMI calculations. Guess what, it’s completely inaccurate according to my last physical, which included a body fat analysis. That’s a minor quibble though since BMI itself is the issue, being very inaccurate for people with a low or high amount of muscle mass.
Daily Calorie Expenditure - FitDay seems to have calculated a relatively high daily calorie burn rate for me. Without taking into account my workouts, FitDay believes I am spending about 3100 calories a day. I’m still trying to verify this number but this could just be my own poor math skills and not FitDay’s issue.
Reports - As much as I like them, I want more! Give me more details, more breakdowns and more ways to slice and dice the data.
Workout Tracker - Would be nice to be able to track a workout on FitDay, down to what exercises I did and with what weights. There’s other sites that do this but I hate using multiple sites for related things. I want everything in one place where it’s easy to see and compare.
So Is FitDay Worth Using?
Yes, I think so. I’m not spending much time maintaining my information (maybe 10 minutes total each day) and for that time investment, I’m getting back a lot of useful data. So I think I’ll keep going with this service and see how much I like it a month or two from now.
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Nov
20
Announcement - Please Read
Filed Under Announcement, Web Site | 6 Comments
I started 60 in 3 a few months ago as a way to share what I had learned about fitness and eating healthy. I wanted it to be a place where I provided useful information to people struggling with the same problems I had a few years ago. 60 in 3 was never supposed to be a business or a place for me to make money. It was supposed to be fun, not a job.
Unfortunately, I think I’ve succumbed to the temptation of having a large profitable blog at the expense of time and quality. I spend quite a bit of time marketing the site, working with search engine optimization and coming up with content that will appeal to search queries. This is something I never had in mind when I started this side and it’s a direction I’ve decided I don’t really want to go down.
So I’m going to be moving 60 in 3 back to a personal blog about fitness rather than a commercial one. That means a few things will change:
- Posting schedule will move from every weekday to every Monday, Wednesday and Friday plus a weekend post. I feel like I was trying too hard to come up with content at the expense of quality. I think this will let me focus on good helpful information again.
- Some ads will disappear. Not all of them unfortunately since the site still costs a bit of money to maintain, but a few will.
- I’ll be marketing the site a lot less. If people find it and like it, that’s great and I hope they become regular readers.
I hope you all will bear with me through these changes and continue to find 60 in 3 a useful site for your fitness and health needs.
Regards,
Gal
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Nov
8
Begone, evil diet ads!
Filed Under Announcement, Web Site | 1 Comment
I’ve finally found a way to banish those stupid “lose 100lbs in 3 days” ads from 60 in 3. It’s always bothered me that they were there, even as I was telling people not to use them. So you should hopefully see less and less of them as time go by. If you do see one, please send me an email or post a comment with the URL it points to.
Thank You,
Gal
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