Pet Info - Create Sharable Stats

[mike-webster]

Description

I've found it to be helpful to give people some info about Max's schedule when I leave him overnight places. It helps people understand how often and when he needs to go out.

The only thing I've actually been tracking is poo/pee because I'm a lazy piece of shit, but this would definitely be more helpful if I were tracking everything.

The idea here would be to create an email that's accessible by "magic email link" (not public) that you could share with people who are watching for your pet. It will show them the last few days of stats, and it should also allow a place for just general notes/tips you'd like to share with the caretaker.

DB Changes

• pet_info - new table
  • id pk
  • pet_id fk
  • note string

Technical Details

• We will need a new page for the caretaker's view
  • The authentication will be triggered by the url containing a token that is provided in the url we send in the email.
  • It will show the stats for the last 3 days, including the charts.
    • The charts should be frozen in time, because the owner won't be keeping track of stats
• We will need a new page for the user's view to send the user the email

Open Questions

• Can we make the token length configurable by the user? This way if I need someone to watch my dog for 3 days, I don't need a new email every day.
• Should the entire caretaker view just be static?
  • We then wouldn't need to worry about authentication
  • The stats would then already be frozen in time
  • The only "pro" I can think of for keeping it on-platform would be if we did this... we could allow the caretaker to also add events if they so choose, but I'm not sure how realistic that would be.
• How should we display the notes?
• Anything else we want to store in the db?
• Any additional features we should include on caretaker page/email?

QA Notes

[mike-webster]

@tony-opp do you have any thoughts on this? Take a look through those open questions and let me know if you have any ideas.

[mike-webster]

The purpose behind this, to put it in a sentence, is to help whoever is watching your pet for you understand the needs of the pet.

[tony-opp]

This is a great idea that would legitimately be helpful!

I think a single static page linked to via email would be the best way to accomplish this. Like you said, the only benefit of an on-platform page I can think of would be that the caretaker could add events, and a static page would be a lot simpler to implement. You could always try a static page and then revisit this if you see a need arise. I don't think the benefits of an on-platform page outweigh the work to implement.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine everything the caretaker would need to see would be:

• Recent pee times
• Recent poo times
• Recent feeding times
• Maybe a toggle section for medicine, if the pet needs it?
• Misc Notes

I was thinking it might be more user-friendly to show average pee/poo/feed times in addition to showing the charts, so the caretaker would have a single stat to look at and could get the info they need at a glance with the charts as secondary information.

Is that reasonable? Most people feed and let their pets out at pretty consistent times throughout the day, right? It might even be helpful to display this information separated by morning/afternoon/night, so the caretaker has a sort of schedule generated for them. If that's not reasonable, then I think it would make sense to group the information by category (pee times, poo times, etc).

As for displaying notes, I think just a simple text area would work. I'm assuming notes would be simple sentences like "He likes to chew on shoes", "Keep him away from X", etc?