We’d like to welcome Bob Hawkinson of JoyofDiabetes.com as the newest writer for the SugarStats.com Blog. Bob has had to deal with and manage diabetes on a daily basis for 45 years and takes a pro-active approach to his diabetes management.

Bob takes a positive outlook on it all and it reflects refreshingly in his writing style. We welcome him to the blog and look forward to his future contributions to educate, inspire and help inform diabetics and non-diabetics alike world-wide.

Be sure to check out his book: “The Joy of Diabetes”.

Here is a little bit more about Bob:

“Bob’s account of his life with diabetes is a testimony to the truth that people with this chronic illness can lead very joyful, fulfilling lives. He focuses primarily on his accomplishments in a way that is uplifting to the reader.

At the same time he acknowledges that he must constantly prepare himself to manage his diabetes in whatever direction his life’s journey takes him. Bob demonstrates that people with diabetes can pursue whatever they want as long as preparation is made to handle the special needs of their blood sugar in that circumstance. By taking a pro-active approach to the management of his diabetes, he is a positive example for diabetics and all the people who love them. He stays one step ahead of his blood sugar through constant trial and error. At times it is a struggle but a fight well worth fighting. In his own words, “the management of diabetes is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Join the SugarStats Community Blog

Do you also have a passion for better diabetes management, educating/informing people and would also like to contribute to the SugarStats community blog?

Feel free to contact us at info@sugarstats.com and send us some examples of your writing, we’d love to talk to you.

Just a quick up to note that we’ve quickly added customizable glucose ranges as it was highly requested. We quickly implemented a simple and basic solution that will work for the majority of people.

You specify a range between what you consider low and what you consider high (i.e: 70-150), that then becomes your in-range value. Anything below is consider low and anything above is high.

You can easily see what your (more…)

2007 has been a great year, so much has happened and we’ve grown so much. Based on how things are going now 2008 is going to be one AMAZING year for SugarStats and thank each and every one of you for helping make that happen.

Things are happening so fast and we’ve got a ton of new stuff coming out in the coming months so stay tuned!

So from everyone on the SugarStats team, to all our blog readers and diabetic users, we wish you all a very happy and safe new year!

Public Sharing

We’re introducing a small new feature for all accounts called Public URL sharing. This makes things a bit easier to share your statistics while at the same time not having to create a TrustedVue login for everyone you to see them.

What will I see?

You’ll now see a “Share” link at the top of many pages. When Public Sharing is turned on you’ll then be presented with a URL you can copy/paste and send anywhere and to anyone you like. Put it in an Email, Blog post, Social Network, Instant Message or anywhere else you like. You basically get an address you can hotlink anywhere.

What will viewers see?

When people go to this page, they’ll see your statistics in a read-only view as well as a limited navigation for common pages. It is similar to what TrustedVue users see, but with a limited subset of data and they isn’t any messaging. For your immediate diabetes support team and the people you trust, we still recommend giving them each a TrustedVue login.

Right now you can only share single day pages and multi-day statistics/trend pages. We’ll be implementing the graphs in the near future

Privacy

You’re data is of course up to you to choose to share so public sharing is disabled by default. You can easily turn it on my clicking the checkbox in your settings.

For more info on Public Sharing and how to enable it please visit the Public Sharing Help Wiki Page

Multiple Entry Single Input Form

This has been a popular request and is something that will hopefully make it easier to input a large amount of various entries at once. This makes it easy to input all your sugar, med, food and activity entries in one form at the end of the day for example.

We give you quite a few by default and you can always add more by clicking, well, “Add More” Blank entries will be skipped so you don’t have to worry about removing them before submitting.

Set time for entries input via Email or Twitter

Now you can input entries later in the day and still specify a specific time in which the entry happened earlier. Specifying the time is optional and looks like this:

Some examples Via Email:

bg 146 at 11am This is my comment
bg 190 at 1:10pm 
bg 111 @ 12pm
med [med_mobile_code] 6 at 8:15am optional comment
med [med_mobile_code] 10 @ 11pm

Some examples via Twitter.com:

d ss1 bg 146 at 11am This is my comment
d ss1 bg 190 at 1:10pm 
d ss1 bg 111 @ 12pm
d ss1 med [med_mobile_code] 6 at 8:15am optional comment
d ss1 med [med_mobile_code] 10 @ 11pm

Up next we’ll be working on ways to input food and activity entries as well as set events/tags for each entry so stay tuned. For more info check out the Mobile Input Help Page

Other changes

We’ve made a few smaller changes as well:

• Overall design tweaks throughout the application.
• Added compression to the web pages meaning things should feel a bit snappier
• Improved the messaging in SugarStats. Messages are displayed in a nicer format.
• RSS Feeds for the public view. Private RSS feeds for non-public shared accounts coming soon.
• Tons of minor bug fixes

We’ve got tons of even more great new stuff coming out very soon too so stay tuned!

I had the great opportunity a few weeks ago to talk with and be interviewed by Charlie Cherry of the DiabetesPowerShow.com Podcast, in my opinion one of the best online diabetes podcast out there.

Today they released the interview in their latest show, episode 34, in which they discuss some of the latest and best online resources for diabetes and diabetes management.

Chris, Chris and Theresa do an excellent job also of showcasing some other amazing resources, tools and websites out there that every diabetic can benefit from. They also chat about our favorite diabetes social networking site TuDiabetes.com

You can find and subscribe to the show here:
http://diabetespowershow.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=271503

Or download it directly here:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/diabetespowershow/34_34_On-Line_Resources.mp3

What a great bunch, I have to thank Charlie for having me on and Chris, Chris and Theresa for producing such a great show all the time. I can’t wait to be on the show and meet them all when I’m in Vegas.

Diabetic? Have an iPod? If you aren’t already subscribed then run, not walk, and subscribe to the biggest, best and most informative Diabetes podcast online. www.diabetespowershow.com

With Health 2.0 Conf behind us, we just have to say that we had a blast and have to thank Matthew and Indu for putting on such a great production.

Our only regret is that it was a bit short (one day) but the info, networking and overall energy was amazing. We want to thank all of you who came and that we were able to talk to.

We’re positive many fruitful initiatives will come out of the relationships made at Health 2.0. Hopefully next time we’ll have at least 2 days or at least a 2nd day just for un-conference networking.

Here is a pretty good video overview of the conference with some interviews by the icyou.com team:

Thanks again to everyone who we met and who was able to come out and make the conference. We look forward to seeing you all next time too

We’ll be at the Health 2.0 Conference on September 20th in San Fran, if you’re also going we’d love to meet you.

It will definitely be a jam-packed day, there is plenty on the agenda. If you’ll be at the conference or in the area and would like to get together feel free to drop an email to: info@sugarstats.com

Twitter Integration

We’re happy to announce Twitter.com integration with SugarStats! Now you can quickly add sugar and med entries via Twitter direct message to our ss1 Twitter account.

The great thing about this is now you also have the ability to choose from the monstrous array of 3rd party twitter apps on top of Web, IM, SMS for inputting entries into SugarStats.

Now you can just send a Twitter message like this:

Then an entry of 108 goes directly into your SugarStats account at the date and time of the message; Comment optional.

If you want to share your sugar info with your Twitter circle you can enable the option within SugarStats to have new entries posted to your Twitter account. This is just the beginning and we’ll be improving it as time goes on, including adding events/tags.

For all the details and instructions check out our Twitter input help page

What is Twitter?

Twitter.com is the wildly popular micro-blogging service which allows people to answer one question very easily: “What are you doing?” in less then 140 characters. It is a great way to keep in contact with friends, family and also find out what other people are up to via Web, IM, SMS and Desktop applications.

For more info on Twitter go to Twitter.com and Twitter.com/faq