It's Business Time

An open letter to all Bedpost users

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:23:00 -0400

Well hello there.

Chances are you had no idea this blog existed, and you have no idea who or what is behind Bedposted.com, and you probably don’t really care that much. And that’s fine. It’s the way I’ve wanted to keep it for about a year now.

You see, I’ve worked for 4 years (a long time for a web designer) at a company that was let’s just say interested in what its employees were doing outside of the office. And due to the somewhat racy and easily-misunderstood nature of Bedpost, I quietly developed it during the late hours of the week and weekends.

When I say “I” here, I really mean that. There is no “we,” no group, no set of investors or project managers or even web developers besides myself. I conceived (ha), designed and built Bedpost all by my lonesome, and the experience has been truly amazing.

I’m asked over and over again why I made it, how I came up with the idea and who I had in mind while doing it. If you’re interested, keep reading.

The night of July 7th, nine years ago, I couldn’t sleep. (You’ll see why I know the date so precisely in a minute.) While this is unremarkable in and of itself, what happened during those hours awake was kind of interesting. I managed in my fugue state to be inspired with an idea that I just couldn’t let go, so I got up and I made it. I was thinking back over my day, going through how long it took me to get to work, what I ate while I was there, what things I had done during the day, and so on. While doing so, I envisioned some kind of layer beneath everything that recorded what you were doing into a document to be read later in sort of a Defending Your Life kind of way, and it occurred to me that HTML was a pretty neat way of doing that. So I took the main data points of the previous day and codified them into an XML/HTML-type language. I even color-coded it so that when you looked at it in a browser, it resembled what HTML might look like in BBEdit. After a rough draft was complete, I went to bed and mercifully, slept.

For a couple of years, that was more or less the end of it, but the idea of quantifying the qualitative aspects of your life in a fun, clever way had grabbed ahold of me.

As these things so often happen, in 2003 another day arrived and I found myself wondering how many times my wife and I had had sex. If you’ve read any of the articles below, you’ll know that my wife and I have been together since we were teenagers in high school; we even went to prom together. This is a fact I’ve found that surprises most people.

At any rate, this magical number is unknowable, but I remembered back to my silly life-as-html thing and I did what I did before: I made something. After about two weeks, I had a single-user app in PHP to record our sex life in a really simple way. Seeing as how the idea is well, weird, I of course asked my wife’s opinion on whether I should build such a thing and luckily enough, she agreed to it. Which is good because I’d already started.

For about two years afterward, we watched the calendar fill up and the bar charts vary in their heights and we giggled to ourselves and we strived to make the average weekly number go up.

It was fun, if difficult to explain to our friends.

Quite a few of them, once getting over the strangeness of the idea, told us that they wouldn’t use such a silly tool, but surely someone on the internet would. To jump back a second, I need to reiterate that I was a really terrible PHP programmer. Just awful. I was not in any place to release something on the web that other people - potentially a lot of people - would use on a semi-daily basis. So I waited. I watched the blogs, I searched every few months, assuming that someone else would have the same idea. No one did (I would later find out I wrong about that, but the actual implementation left a lot to be desired and I wasn’t even aware of it until after Bedpost launched). So finally - and appropriately - while we were waiting for our third child to be born, during those quiet hours we knew would not last very much longer and with my wife’s gentle support, I started coding. The rest is basically history.

Having spent way too many words explaining the exact mental state from which an idea such as Bedpost sprung, I essentially wanted to let you know that I no longer work where I did when I started this journey and I can only hope my new employer doesn’t recoil in disgust when I alert them to my project. Either way though, this really means a renewed interest and focus on this strangely wonderful and fun-to-use thing that has been at the back of my mind for the better part of a decade.

So… Thanks. And please be patient, I have a lot of things in my head yet to build.

Bedpost in The Village Voice: Can’t Keep Track of Your Sex Life?...

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:24:04 -0500

Bedpost in The Village Voice:

Can’t Keep Track of Your Sex Life? The Internet Can.

What would your sex life look like as a pie chart? How many times have you orgasmed from intercourse over the last twenty years? Has your favorite position changed over the years?

Bedpost in the SF Weekly Heartless Doll: 10 Social Networks and...

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:13:09 -0500

Bedpost in the SF Weekly Heartless Doll:

10 Social Networks and What They Say About the People Who Use Them

7. The Bedpost user: sexual, meticulous, loves pedometers A site for those who want to catalog their every sexual encounter, Bedpost caters to those who have enough sex to chart. They have to be meticulous (Which positions did you participate in? When? With whom?) and like documenting somewhat random human activities — like how many steps they take each day.

Bedpost on Infosthetics: an online website that tracks &...

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:35:00 -0500

Bedpost on Infosthetics:

an online website that tracks & visualizes the time & frequency one has sex, & with whom. an additional tagging feature provides an even deeper insight into these activities. potentially one of the most personal of datasets one can keep, maintain & visualize outside of financial records.

Bedpost in The Wall Street Journal: The New Examined Life: Why...

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:31:00 -0500

Bedpost in The Wall Street Journal:

The New Examined Life: Why more people are spilling the statistics of their lives on the Web.

Part experimentation, part self-help, such “personal informatics” projects, as they are known, are gathering steam thanks to people like Mr. Felton who find meaning in the mundane. At their disposal are a host of virtual tools to help them become their own forensic accountants, including Web sites such as Dopplr, which allows people to manage and share travel itineraries, and Mon.thly.Info, for tracking menstrual cycles. Parents can document infant feeding schedules with Trixie Tracker. And couples can go from between the sheets to spreadsheets with Bedpost, which helps users keep track of their amorous activities.

For those wanting to quantify their bedroom life, Bedpost offers categorization and visualization tools for all of one’s amorous activities. The site tracks frequency over time and allows users to describe what they do as well as create charts and tables about their favorite sexual acts and partners.

Bedpost in la Repubblica (translated via Google): Here’s...

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:20:00 -0500

Bedpost in la Repubblica (translated via Google):

Here’s how to get online the diaries of erotic confessions

The application appears as a timetable divided into boxes. A second sexual turn is assigned to each cell a different color from pink to rose more intense, so as to easily view month by month the evolution of his business: intense, if the month appears as a mosaic tones powder , In white if it appears as a white page. Clicking on the day are revealed, as in the pages of a secret diary, details more spicy.

BitchBuzz Beta Review: Is Bedpost Just a Glorified...

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:13:00 -0400

BitchBuzz Beta Review: Is Bedpost Just a Glorified Calendar?

Finally! A 2.0 site that isn’t about bringing you closer to people you’ve been working hard to forget for ten years, isn’t totally boring and doesn’t want to induct me into the GTD cult. Naturally, it has to do with sex. It’s a new site called Bedpost that allows you to track how much sex you are having, or in some cases, how much you are nothaving.

Bedpost featured on the Playboy Sex News blog

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:08:00 -0400

Bedpost featured on the Playboy Sex News blog

Self-tracking websites give new meaning to graphic sex On...

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:54:00 -0400

Self-tracking websites give new meaning to graphic sex

On BedPosted.com, which is still in beta testing, users are asked to log their sexual activity on a calendar, including such information as partner names, times of activity, the quality of the encounters and descriptive words to describe them. The site analyzes the data and creates various charts and diagrams that reveal that person’s long-term preferences and trends.

Bedpost tags your headboard notches Sex-tracking app Bedpost...

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:46:00 -0400

Bedpost tags your headboard notches

Sex-tracking app Bedpost has offered up a round of beta invites just in time for a kids-today-and-their-websites! mention in the Washington Post. The concept is so close to something that has surely erupted a dozen times as drunken afterhours banter at MIT: If only we could monitor how often and how well we get laid, we’d be able to take nerd control over our sex lives. And Bedpost, even in its early releases, gets uncomfortably close to working as a sex predictor — if spreadsheets turn you on.

Bytes of Life - For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function,...

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:07:00 -0400

Bytes of Life - For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There’s a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

One step beyond the hourly Tweets and Facebook status updates, a new kind of site is evolving — not to broadcast your life to others, but to chart it for yourself. Socrates himself might say, “Guys, that’s enough.”