Latest Running Blog Idea

I want a running blog that basically does these things:

• allows daily entries of arbitrary length, including html and multimedia, like i currently have on this blog
• each day to be encoded with data about the run - number of minutes, category of work (tempo, long run, intervals, etc), route, shoes, time of day, weather (could be automatic given time/date and location) etc
• i want to see a big calendar as the main display on the screen. each block on the calendar has some bare-bones information about the run displayed. also, the blocks are color-coded by the type of work done and intensity-coded by the amount of work done (i.e. 1,000m of sprinting would be a light red, and 15 mile long run would be a dark blue)
• I want the ability to display previous months' calendars in miniature size
• i want to be able to plot any variable against any other variable, for example plot weekly milage versus time, using a simple interface. the trendalyzer is a beautiful example. possibly also be able to do things like plot time on the x axis, then on the y axis barefoot miles, shod miles, speedwork miles, distance miles, and tempo miles all in different colors, with little markers indicating on the time axis where special events occurred (races)
  
• i want the entire thing to be easy for other people to use, and i want them to use it.
• i want it to have the ability to manage communities of runners like the one we have going on right now. for example, i want to be able to click on a button marked "my friends" and see eight different monthly calendars pop up, each one labelled with the runner and each one color/intensity coded so that i can see at a glance the general idea of what anyone is up to, then zoom into their calendars easily and without navigating all over the place
• i want to integrate it into the existing infrastructure as much as possible, and avoid reinventing the internet (or wheel)
• your entries should be searchable and easily navigable
  
• everything should be customizable. what the color-coding means (or if you want to use it), whether you view things in calendar or blog mode, what metadata you record with each daily entry, etc. you should be able to use the same system to track your runs or record your practice time on the violin. anywhere that's you're keeping a log of a regular activity, you should be able to adapt the system to help you organize and visualize your data

My latest idea of how to accomplish something like this is to take advantage of what's already there. I'm already posting on the blog each day. It just doesn't have the metadata or the software to read it and make the interface.

But you can make a template for a blog and my guess is I ought to be able to record some metadata like how far i ran each day. Then this data could be accessible to a simple javascript reading the blog and putting together the calendars and charts and things.

You also maybe need some front end software to make creating new blog posts with all that data in them an easy task.

Previously, I was thinking of trying to make a log from scratch, like running.caltech.edu. But that has a couple of problems. It requires me to run and operate my own server, and to store everyone's data there, and to entice random people to come use it.

By integrating with an existing system like Google, there's less work in development (although more work to understand how Blogger works in the first place). Also, the data storage and server issues are all on Google. Finally, the entire system is much simpler because there's no databases involved.

This is still a huge project, because I don't actually know how to do any of the fancy visualization type things I want to do, and don't know how much pre-existing code there is that I'd be able to use to accomplish that task.
I'd also have to learn more internet technology stuff, since my old knowledge about server-side scripting and databases wouldn't be very useful. Nonetheless, thinking about it gets me excited. I think though it would have to be a project that waits until the summer, as was my previous one.

But let me get some feedback. Do other people also wish for a better system for organizing and visualizing the data we're collectively slapping all over the face of the internet?