Find 43things that I would change about 43things

I have read the entries for the Watch the Watchmen goal and it sounds like members of the Westboro Baptist Church have joined 43 Things to attack people who don’t think like them.

It makes me angry and sad that goals and/or accounts are being deleted because someone else judges them to be unworthy and that 43Things is not taking action to defend someone’s first amendment right to post what they want.

Who are we to judge another person’s entry? Someone who would think “grow wings” is a silly goal is likely completely off base regardless of the entries underneath. Here are possible justifications:

1. Maybe they are a Red Bull drinker and their slogan is “Red Bull Gives you Wings”. Even if an advertising message is being transmitted, it is not conveying to me that I need to buy it or consider it for purchase, so it does not offend me in the least.

2. Maybe it is an idiom for someone who yearns for freedom. I’m sure the NW Nazi’s would be against that.

3. There are so many people with “wings” tattoos out there, there is nothing illegal or non-nonsensical about getting a tattoo.

I could go on and on about each and every goal out in the 43 Things universe that I don’t understand, but freedom of speech should overrule any thought in my head that I would have about how someone else should be allowed to express themselves and their goals.

Nuff Said! Let’s see if the entry gets noticed with this pic :-)

Depending how you create a goal, you may or may not get the option to share the goal with others. I went through this before when sharing my bootcamp goal and thought I figured it out but I am having problems all over again trying to share the goal. I will be editing this entry as I figure it out all over again!

(Update) I still don’t know why it doesn’t show the share dialogue in my goal info, but here is the shortcut http:
http://www.43things.com/invitations/invite/4806297

With full credit to “Living In God’s Exquisite, Miraculous Sufficiency” for this excellent suggestion:

I wish 43T had this feature that lets you select someone, and then they had this option for each person to list all the posts of theirs that you have NOT cheered.

There are a handful of people whom I’ve cheered almost all, if not all their posts they’ve ever written or have a hard time finding posts and goals I have not cheered of theirs. I would love to cheer some people more, but out of the thousands of goals or cheers, maybe the few I haven’t, it’s too hard to find.

It’s just one of those wish things about 43 that I’ve wished for a long time. So, if you cheer me a lot, and I don’t tend to cheer back quite as quickly or often, it’s because I have a hard time finding things to cheer as you either don’t write enough posts, I’ve cheered most of your goals & posts or something like that.

I know that may be the case for some people with me, too. It’s all good. No need to stress. Send the cheers where they may and bless others. Sprinkle cheer dust everywhere.

Her original post is here: http://www.43things.com/entries/view/5499171

P.S. Because I understand the 43Things program a bit better than most, this is actually a simple search that would be easy to implement, but knowing how to do it and actually getting the robot-coop team to add it are 2 entirely different things!

I don’t usually use a bunch of formatting codes in my posts, but occasionally one of my entries needs that extra picture or text effects and it is such a pain sometimes figuring out out the alternate codes that the “textile” requires even with the guidelines in 43things.

Today’s example had to do with imbedding an image. I used the ‘’ buffer to put in my image but it was not appearing. Then i found out it had to have a .jpg .gif or .png extension or it would not display. Took me 30 minutes to figure this out and it would be a big improvement to just use regular HTML code as opposed to all this specialty blogger tags.

According to the 43things faq
(http://www.43things.com/about/view/faq ):

Select the “Remove” option from the pop-up menu.
Select “I give up” from the pop-up menu (the selection on the right).
You’ll now have an “I’ve given up” tab with the item you just gave up on appearing on that list.

Instead my goal just disappeared and no tab show up. Did they make another change without telling anyone? This is the first time I tried to use the I give up feature for “Update Quicken” because I decided to use a different software instead.

(Update 10 minutes later) The entire 43things interface seems to have changed, but it’s too late to investigate further but an “I’ve Given Up” tab with my former goal with no link to my entries is there.

(Update 6 hours later) Ok, The “I give Up” folder only appears when you are viewing the ‘I’ve done’ tab. And when I created a new entry for my “I gave up” goal, I found it it only appears in the stream of what everyone has done on that goal, there is no link to just your entries for that goal. The interface is clumsy and really should be fixed to match how the rest of the site works. That would make it less confusing.

Several fellow 43thingers observed that you actually lose cheers if a 43things member deletes his account. This seems a bit unfair to all 43things users that keep track of their cheers. Can’t your total cheers given be put in a bucket that does not get deleted if a user quits?

Noticed that my “completed” things for 2010 and “how I did it” entries were not totaled together. All the items that I wrote “how I did it” entries should be included in “completed” as well. Is there a reason not to total them together? In 2010, it shows that I “completed” only 1 thing, but I wrote “how I did it” entries for 17 things which IS the actual number of things I completed.

Sent a message to Robot Coop on this one.

Thanks to LifeRenewed for suggesting this change, but right now 43Things can only update your email if you receive a comment or private message, but in a world of Txt Messaging, there should be a way to send an SMS to a phone/portable device without needing to check your email.

Tried to strike out text in my entry, but it ain’t happening for me. I tried with HTML and , and i tried with and that didn’t work. I see that other users have done it, so how do you do it? Someplace that has a FAQ or other tool to let me know everything you can do with formatting would be really helpful.

(update) put a hyphen before and after the text you want to show as deleted
text deletion

Ok, so I do have my secret goal as one of the goals on my list, but I can’t really update or post any entries to it without giving away what it really is. There should be a way to indicate a goal as private which would not display to everyone, but you could still update it for yourself without feeling too awkward or self-conscious about it.

Many people are self-conscious about their weight, or relationships, and it would make sense to let people have private goals which would just display as “This is a private goal” to everyone else.