We shouldn’t ever lose data but it does happen. We don’t like advertising that fact, but we should acknowledge it because at best it causes lost time similar to an accident on a job site.

A couple years ago we built a really simple web app to track our data loss.

We call the app Data Loss and we have the source up on GitHub. The plan was to “finish” it and get other people using it, but we may never “finish” it, so here it is.

You can go to a specific username, such as http://dataloss.herokuapp.com/collectiveidea and see how long it has been since that person had a data loss accident.

If you want your own, you can claim a page which uses Twitter to sign you in and tie it to your account (it should probably use GitHub, but that didn’t exist when we started it; Pull Requests welcome).

Today, @searls was joking about wanting to track when he was last sick:

I feel like every six months I say "I haven’t been sick in years!" I think I need a http://t.co/71AFopYtbF so you can all call me out.

— Justin Searls (@searls) January 20, 2014

So I quickly updated the code to work for that too, and that’s now hosted at http://sicklysearls.herokuapp.com.

Same code, different purpose.

Have a better idea for what we should do with it? Fork it on GitHub!