Suggestions

[spfautsch]

Couple feature suggestions - apologies if these are duplicates. I did search the forum messages.

1) Add the option to enter fillups / import data using the total amount for the fillup instead of price per gallon.

2) A monthly email containing fillup data in a csv.

I just imported mileage for one of vehicles that I had stored in a custom app I wrote that lived on a thumb drive. After exploring the site, I believe these two suggestions would improve on your already excellent functionality.

[mathowie]

1) this has been requested a bunch, but if you're using Excel, it's not too hard to calculate with a simple operation. We have to keep importing formats as limited as possible so we can parse thousands of records from everyone's various formats, so us clamping down on doing it one way is a small price to pay for successful importing of data.

2) I don't understand how this would be useful to people. What are they supposed to do with the .csv file? Archive it? I could see a monthly email with human-friendly text like "Hi bob, you drove 567 miles and spent $47 on fuel in March, which is 34 miles over your average and $5 more than you spent last month" but a data file over email is a little weird to me.

You can export your entire fuel up history as a .csv file anytime you need, from the site itself.

[Pontiac]

Instead of email with a monthly report, perhaps a month by month analysis of how things are going on our home pages. Even a simple table with the headers:

Distance Traveled

Fuel Used

MPG

Delta Distance

Delta Fuel

Delta MPG

Distance Traveled would be the absolute difference of the Odo readings for the first and last fill up of the month.

Fuel Used would be the sum of all the gas purchased in the month.

MPG would be the calculated value of the previous two fields

The deltas would be just how much more or less was done this month in comparison to last month. (IE: 500km, 40 Litres, etc, just to pick numbers)

I personally already keep my mail client busy with all the mail filters I have setup. No need to add more noise.

[mathowie]

Yeah, Pontiac, we've been discussing a new "reports" section of your car's profile page behind the scenes for a while now. Mostly, it's just trying to come up with more views of your data that are useful.

[kamots]

I don't think option 1 would be smart since usually the gas stations round up the final amount to the first two significant digits. Being able to enter the total gallons pumped and price per gallon which both have 3 digits after the decimal of resolution is more accurate for long-term calculations.

Or at least that is my opinion ^-^

[spfautsch]

mathowie-

1) I wasn't quite as interested in this feature for importing data as I am for adding fillups. Calculating the columns is a 30 second operation in excel. But having the exact total from the receipt is more useful to me than price per gallon. If you disagree with me, I'll have to refer you to my wife who believes she keeps the checkbook.

2) Data archiving is the reason for this request. I don't know how long your site will be around, but my mileage data is important to me. If I can scrape this off the site with a script then I'll do that.

Again, these were just suggestions. No offence was intended. I did search the forum but found nothing. Perhaps my search terms were flawed. At any rate I appreciate the response.

[mathowie]

spfautsch, here is our FAQ entry on how to export all your fuel ups. You can export at any time, as much as you need. You'll get a .csv file you can open in excel. There's no need to scrape data, as we've offered an export since day one.

Sorry I misread what you said about total costs. We like to track cost/gallon and figured it was easier to just list that, but we'll have to think about the interface for offering both (it may be an option in your settings in the future).

[spfautsch]

mathowie-

i guess i shouldn't have used the term 'scrape' - parsing data from html is painful. i read the FAQ from top to bottom before i created an account, so i already knew about the 'blue disk icon' for neophytes. i suppose i'm a bit of a geek in that i feel duty bound to write a shell script to perform such menial tasks as logging in and clicking things to backup my data... isn't that what we have cron for? seriously though, an API or some method to programmatically backup my data would be pretty cool.

i'll keep a lookout for that option on the fillups.