There seems to be a sudden jump in the number of fitness tracking/profile sites out there. I’ve been using Mybodycomp.com, Fitday.com and Bodyforlife-tracker.com for a while now, but now there’s also Fitprofile.com and finally, Muscletank.net (aka Sickofbeingfat.net), a site created by John Stone Fitness forum member boomboom with many exceptional features.

Muscletank is still in beta testing at the moment, but yours truly was given an invitation code to try things out and report any bugs found on the site. The site already features autolink integration with the JSF forums, dynamic image cropping and lighting correction (in other words, you can upload totally crappy photos and edit them right in your browser), a diary, food report, photo gallery, and statistics log.

You will eventually have the option to autolink your profile entries–photos, food logs, stats, and diary–to Fitday, BFL Tracker, Mybodycomp, and any other vBulletin enabled board as well as JSF. Pretty nifty, eh?

When the site goes live, it’s going to be pretty incredible. Check out my profile at: http://causticmuse.muscletank.net

Current beta testers receive a limited number of invitation codes based on their use of the site, so I can give out two invitations at this time. If you are interested in testing out Muscletank.net and would genuinely make an effort to use its features, let me know and I’ll hook you up with a code.

For now, I’m digging the autosig feature which makes this spiffy progress graphic for me based on my current entered stats:

I was scouting around a bit for more nifty things to do to my Wordpress 1.5 installation today when I ran across a few blogs that implemented Gravatars, universal 80×80 pixel avatar images linked to your email address that can follow you around as you comment in any Gravatar-enabled blogs. You sign up at http://www.gravatar.com and upload your own avatar image, and once it is approved, your gravatar will automatically appear next to your comments on any Gravatar-enabled sites you visit.

Here is the page that led me to the whole Gravatar discovery: http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2005/04/06/battlestar-galactica/#comments

You can see that folks with Gravatar accounts have their own custom icons show up, while the people without uploaded/approved icons do not.

I’m still waiting for approval of my avatar, but I’ve already added the Gravatar plugin and code to this site, so those of you with Gravatar accounts should see your pics show up automatically.