Daytum: beautifully-designed site for tracking personal statistics

To give some context to this: Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer who has been known for creating annual reports -- very specific graphic design productions that include minutiae about his life over the past year. You can see 2008's report here: http://feltron.com/index.php?/content/2008_annual_report/

Some time ago, he partnered with a coder to create Daytum, which is an easy way for people to track other statistics about themselves in much the same way that Nicholas Felton does in his reports.

Yes, the details people track in Daytum are usually trivial, unnecessary, etc. Yes, it's a bit of a novelty. But it's certainly unique, and sometimes it's cool to have something like this to track random statistics, even if only for entertainment value.

Hard to read, main page has no lower case.

Without signing up, I don't understand how it works. Do I have to manually enter all my stats into a spreadsheet, or is it better than that?

Not exactly the same goals, but http://your.flowingdata.com/ is simpler and quite useful for things like tracking weight, etc.

But seriously, who needs to know how many hotels someone's slept in over the last month, or what baked goods you've got in your house? Surely the novelty wears off pretty fast.

There are some things that I want to track (running data from my Garmin watch for example), but something as general as this isn't going to be much use for that.

Ehh - having to watch a Vimeo video to understand how this works and how to do things on Daytum is extremely annoying. More work should be done on the ease of use end.

I get the idea that it's cool to present minimalist designs, but they should seriously considering adding some clear on screen instructions for new users.

It looks nicely laid out. But I cannot read it. Perhaps a slightly darker shade of grey could help with the contrast.

This type of applications reminds me a bit of the Moodstats — http://moodstats.com , from way back in 2001 (if I recall correctly).

Built by the Cuban Council - http://cubancouncil.com - in Macromedia Director.

uses google charts to generate charts. that's what i use on a similar project (also flot). i was hoping to see something with a little more javascript interaction. i have the same problem exploring Felton's reports: jumping around is jarring. would rather see mouseovers and zoom ins. ultimately, looking at a really big poster, one that makes sense at different scales when standing 20ft away and 2ft away, is probably the best experience. i want to capture that through a web browser somehow. ideas...?

I don't know if this is "beautifully designed" - more like "sparsely and starkly designed, which conforms to someone's particular idea of beauty".