One of my favorite Web sites: WalkerTracker

by Eszter Hargittai on September 22, 2008

WalkerTracker logoAs promised, in honor of One Web Day, I’m posting information about one of my favorite Web sites and I encourage you to do the same, here or on your own blog. I’m always on the lookout for sites that make a difference in people’s lives and one such site is WalkerTracker. It is no exaggeration that it has had a direct impact on my everyday life as I have become a serious walking enthusiast and thus get more regular exercise now than I had ever before.

Walker Tracker September stepsWalkerTracker helps keep track of one’s daily steps encouraging a healthy lifestyle by offering all sorts of neat statistics and graphs of one’s step measures. Of course, one doesn’t necessarily need a gadget (i.e., a pedometer) or a tool such as this site to go out on walks, but I have found it extremely inspiring and motivating to be able to keep track of my steps and see the progress I make over time. My daily goal is 10,000 steps (that’s about 4-5 miles) and on average I’ve managed to come close to this each month since I’ve started in April, 2007. I’m excited to be averaging almost 12K this month.

The site has several great features and new ones are added all the time, which is impressive since it seems to be a one-man operation. Your data are your data and you can download information you have added to the site very easily. There are also all sorts of options on the site for generating graphs and charts of progress. A user can maintain a step blog, can connect to other users, and can also create groups and competitions. There are also various widget options to showcase progress on one’s own site.

WalkerTracker was created, is maintained and is continually improved by Ben Parzybok, a novelist and Web developer who also seems to be involved in several other interesting projects. Ben is extremely responsive to requests, adding features regularly. The community consists of nice folks who share a love of walking. Use of the site is free although I was happy when Ben added the option of a Pro account since this is a service that deserves support.

To get started, you’ll need a pedometer. WalkerTracker has a list of the most popular ones by its users. Like many others, I rely on an Omron NJ-112 and have bought about half a dozen for family and friends.

{ 3 comments }

1

John Quiggin 09.23.08 at 3:51 am

It’s unoriginal, I know, but Wikipedia has had more of an impact on me than anything else on the web (except CT, of course!).

2

Eszter Hargittai 09.23.08 at 11:31 am

Thanks, John. I’d be curious to hear more about this. Is this because of the ease of access to information you would seek anyway or more because you stumble upon bits and pieces of info that you wouldn’t encounter otherwise, or some entirely different reason?

3

John Quiggin 09.24.08 at 3:36 am

Partly the vast amount of stuff you can get just by wandering from one article to another. It’s like the first days of the Web except that the information on Wikipedia is much more reliable and better sourced than in the wild old days.

But even more it’s being a part of the project as a whole. It’s one place where the utopian vision of the Web has actually been realised in large measure. Of course, the people involved are no different from anyone else, so in that sense it’s not utopian at all, but utopia for me was never about fundamentally transforming people.

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