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Stats mix is out of beta

Statsmix, a cool dashboard builder which I previously reviewed,  is out of beta, according to an email I just received, and an announcement on their blog.

They have have added info about pricing on their site.

I took a brief look at the new release and it seems to address the pricing issue, but not the integration issue.  Still, if I were running a business and needed some custom reporting measured over time, StatsMix would merit a serious evaluation.

Business Useful Tools | moore |

Useful Tools: StatsMix makes it easy to build a dashboard

I haven’t been to a BDNT lately, but still get their email announcements.  In August, all the 2010 TechStars folks presented, and were listed in the email.  I took a look at each company, and signed up when the company seemed to be doing something cool.  I always want to capture my preferred username, mooreds!

One that was very interesting to me was StatsMix; I signed up for their beta.  On Nov 1, I got invited to sign up.  Wahoo!

Statsmix lets users build custom dashboards.  I am developing an interest in web analytics (aside: if you are interested in this topic, I highly recommended Web Analytics 2.0, by Avinahsh Kaushik).  I’ve been playing with Piwik, an open source analytics toolkit, but Statsmix offers a slicker solution.

They have made it dead simple to create a custom dashboard for users.  They offer integration with, at this time, 29 services (twitter, mailchimp, youtube, Google Analytics, etc).  I could not find an up to date list of integration services outside of their webapplication!  The best I could find was this list from September.  While the integration interface is slick, the data integration is rudimentary.  For example, they will let you monitor the number of rows in a Google Spreadsheet, but nothing more (like rows in different columns, or the value in a particular cell–would be nice to see them integrate with Google Apps Scripting); you can track the number of likes on Facebook, but not the number of comments.

The real power of StatsMix comes from the ease of integration with your own custom stats.  They offer an API which is accessible via REST.  This means that you can push information from your database to a beautiful looking dashboard with shell scripts and a cron job.  Very cool!  It would be nice to see a plugin for Magento or other ecommerce vendors; I recently had a client, The Game Frame, that would have been a great fit for this type of dashboard, since it aggregates beyond what the ecommerce software provides.

Other cool features:

  • The whole UI is beautiful and farily intuitive.
  • The dashboard supports custom date ranges.
  • They will send you an email of stats every day, and apparently have some kind of limited version you can pass onto clients.  I didn’t play with the email feature at all, though it is extremely useful.

However, all is not perfect.  Some issues with StatsMix include:

  • As mentioned above, the integration with third party services leaves something to be desired.  What they offer is a nice start, but it’d be great to see them create some kind of marketplace where developers could build solutions.  For example, the twitter widget only tracks the number of followers.  From the TWitter API, it appears to be pretty easy to track the number of mentions, which could be a useful metric.
  • It wasn’t clear how to share a dashboard, though that may be an upcoming feature.
  • The terms of use are, as always, pretty punishing.
  • Once you develop a number of custom metrics, you are tied to their platform.  That wouldn’t be so bad, except…
  • They are planning to charge for the service, but give no insight into what to expect.  There is a tab called ‘Billing’ but all it says is: “During our beta, StatsMix is free to use. After the beta, you’ll be able to manage your billing preferences on this page.”  If I was considering using this as part of my business, I would want much more insight into possible costs before I committed much time to custom metric buildouts.  I’m fine with them making money, just want more insight into this key aspect of their web app.

All in all, it is well worth a try.  If you to, let me know by posting a comment.  I have 5 invites to give out.

Cloud Computing Programming Social Media Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Update on GWO for a non profit

Well, after a week or two of data collection, the GWO experiment I had set up for the WILD Foundation caused an issue–apparently it was preventing a javascript shadowbox from working. I didn’t want to get into troubleshooting a javascript component that I had never used on pages I had never seen, so I recommended turning off the experiment to see if that solved the issue.

It did. I knew there was a way to include the GWO javascript just where it was used, on the home page, but I got busy, and by the time I was able to do this, they were hip deep in a website rework. I’ve been involved in website redesigns with too many cooks in the kitchen, so I just asked them to let me know when the dust has settled so I can restart the experiment.

Lessons learned:

  • sometimes volunteer projects take a long time to get to results, and almost definitely will take longer than you plan
  • other opportunities can spring out of volunteering–I showed Emily some space available via another non profit I’m involved in, and she’s looking at possibilities for a fundraiser there.  This never would have happened if I hadn’t volunteered previously
  • the process opened up some ideas for the non profit around changing the home page to highlight things they wanted to focus–sometimes, any perspective from outside an organization is useful

    I’ll let you know when I get a chance to re-enable GWO on the WILD site, but I thought I’d give an update.

    New Tech Meetup Useful Tools | moore |

    My Firefox plugins

    I recently moved to a new computer, and have been rebuilding my desktop environment.  I just wanted to list my Firefox plugins for future reference.

    • The Web Developer Toolbar lets you view css, disable javascript, resize your browser precisely, outline block elements and so much more.
    • Colorzilla is invaluable for a developer like me to copy a color palate correctly.
    • S3Fox lets you manage Amazon S3 buckets and their content.
    • Firebug lets you examine web pages in detail, including network operations/
    • YSlow is an add on for Firebug that evaluates site performance based on a variety of metrics
    • Some kind of whois tool–sometimes you need to know who registered that domain name

    These are my drop dead extensions for typical web development work.  What am I missing?  Do you have any to recommend?

    Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

    Upgrading WordPress is shockingly easy

    I was all set to write a post about my experience with the most recent BDNT, when I got distracted by an excellent post from Josh Fraser about never using captchas–excellent post well worth the read. After reading through the comments, mollom seemed like a great way to avoid captcha and comment moderation, and I decided to give it a try. However, mollom didn’t work on my ancient version of wordpress (2.0). This being a weekend I’m heading out of town, it seemed like the perfect time to upgrade my wordpress site (the backend–I hope you’ll notice that the soothing front end look and feel hasn’t changed).

    I browsed through the releases list to find the oldest one with automatic upgrade functionality, and then followed the quite painless upgrade guide. From there, it was a pretty simple matter to automagically upgrade to 3.0. Shockingly easy.

    Overall, it looks like there are a few snafus–the home page didn’t have a sidebar because of post content for a bit, my tagging plugin doesn’t appear to be compatible with this version of wordpress–but it looks like all the content is there. If you see any content that looks broken, and you feel charitable, please post a comment on this entry.

    Blog Useful Tools | moore |

    Piwik now has goals

    About a year ago, I wrote about piwik, a replacement for javascript based analytics tools like Google Analytics.  I installed it on a couple of my sites, and have been watching it progress with regular updates.  As of the latest version (0.6.3), they now have goals!  To me, that is one of the key features of any analytics tool.  Now you can have the analysis and not have to share it with anyone else (though you do have to update and maintain the software yourself, unless you use a site like My Free Web Stats).

    After enabling the goal plugin, I set up a quick goal to track commenting on my blog (or at least if someone clicks the submit button on the comment form).  The basic documentation on goal tracking doesn’t discuss how to do this, though it does cover url based tracking pretty well.  A quick search turned up this page, which explains how to write the javascript to track a goal manually (which I then placed in an onclick handler).  This bug post on goal tracking via links may be useful too.

    I’m happy to see a well done open source alternative to analytics tools that lets you control your data.  Piwik probably won’t be of interest to many people (most will just drop in Google Analytics and call it good), but for a few may be indispensible.  And support for goals is a key part of the maturation of this project.

    [tags]piwik,goals,opensource,analytics[/tags]

    Useful Tools | moore |

    Malware Removal Guide

    I had an issue last week with my Windows PC, which is currently running Windows XPSP3.  Mac users, you can stop reading right now.

    Midafternoon one day, I started receiving errors when I would try to open certain executables by clicking on their icons (on the desktop, the start menu, in explorer).  The error message was “The specified path does not exist” followed by the pathname of the executable.  When I opened the file manager and browsed to that path, sure enough, the file was there.  In addition, when I shut my computer down, I was seeing the 0xc000012 error message.
    There were some really weird things about this behavior.  First of all, it affected some executables (like notepad and all my browsers) but not others (like yahoo messenger).  Second, starting up the executables from the command line worked, as did starting them up by another program (as in, one of the programs which started up fine had a ‘check for updates’ option, which started FireFox just fine).  Also, I could start any program by right clicking on it and ‘running as’ a different user.  Finally, in safe mode, everything worked fine, which indicated, thankfully, that I didn’t have a hardware problem, and also gave me a chance to do a backup of everything, Just In Case.
    I won’t walk you through all the links I found via google, or explain my frustration, or talk about the tools I used to try to fix the issue.  I’m just going to tell you what worked for me.  I finally stumbled on this fantastic malware and spyware removal guide from Geeks To Go.  I printed it out, downloaded all the tools, and followed the directions faithfully.  And now I’m up and running.

    This was my first spyware infection in the 7 years I’ve been running Windows XP.  I hope to go another 7 years, but if I don’t, I now know where to turn to first.

    [tags]malware removal,spyware removal[/tags]

    Useful Tools | moore |

    BrowserMob: Load test your applications using the cloud

    Via this tweet from Matt Raible, I learned of BrowserMob.  This service allows you to easily load test your web application.

    I set it up in about 2 minutes to do a simple load test of a client’s site (though 5 pages).  They make it free to ‘test drive’ their service (though the free not enough to actually stress your site).  It is extremely easy to test a path through a publicly facing system.

    The report was good enough; you get screen captures of pages that have failures, and they do a good job of making some of the performance data pretty and intelligible.  Again, I didn’t really load test anything, so I didn’t examine the report as closely as I would have in a real world scenario.  The service is built using Selenium, and I believe they allow you to upload full featured selenium tests (if you have already invested in this technology, but don’t want to build out a cloud network).

    This service is of particular interest to me because last year I was part of a project that built a selenium grid on Amazon EC2, using these instructions.

    If we’d known about BrowserMob, I’m not sure we would have used them, as I don’t know what our budget was, but it would have been nice to have that in the evaluation mix.

    [tags]browsermob, cloud services,load testing[/tags]

    Cloud Computing Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

    Online Tools for Enriching an Offline Community, CSA edition

    I had a meeting yesterday with a Anne Cure, a farmer, and her web specialist.  She grows food that I buy via my CSA (community supported agriculture) share–I have a list of Colorado CSAs if you’re looking.  Anne, and the rest of the farmers she works with, has created a great offline community as part of the CSA.  There are multiple events at the farm, including an end-of-year pig roast.  As a CSA member, you get great veggies, you are part of a community and you support a local farm.  It’s win-win-win.

    I asked Anne to meet with me because I felt that, while there was some member to member interaction, it wasn’t as prevalent as it could be.  Often, at CSA pickup, I wouldn’t talk to anyone except for Anne, or one of the other farm workers.  And I rarely observed any of the other members having any interactions either.

    Being a web guy, I thought that bringing the community online might help.  Of course, there are always challenges around that–it takes work to maintain an online community too!

    Here’s a list of all the ideas I thought of to leverage the offline community Cure Organic Farm has built, as well as some we discussed during the meeting.

    Some of these ideas take little effort, some take a lot.  Some bring in revenue, some don’t.  Some put all the effort onto existing staff, others leverage excited community members.  Some had been done already, some they had never heard of.

    Hopefully anyone else who has created an offline community can pick and choose useful tools and ideas, from below, to enhance that community online.  If you have additional suggestions, please feel free post them in the comments.

    • Use posterous to create a dead simple blog.  Leverage its auto posting capabilities to push content into other social networks (twitter, Facebook, etc, etc).  Use twitter/FB to drive traffic to their farmstand.  Cure Organic Farm does already have a Facebook page.
    • Use email list management software, like MailChimp, and look at the reports to see if email is a useful (aka ‘read’) means of communication.
    • Promote carpooling to pick up CSAs–save gas and promote interaction between members.  Consider using a tool like Divide the Ride.
    • Add a page of ‘Cookbooks Anne Uses’ (they already have a links page of various recipe sites).  Have that link to Amazon and you could possibly make latte money from it.
    • Cure Organic Farm puts out a great weekly newsletter during the CSA season, full of quotes and recipes.  However, searching it is an issue (I suggested Google Custom Search).
    • Also, making those recipes available in some kind of ingredient specific manner would be useful.  Even if the recipes aren’t broken out, just knowing that I can find a recipe for garlic scape pesto in newsletter #5 from 2008 is useful.  This could be done with a simple database or even plain HTML.
    • Forums, of course, are great community building tools.  They also are great for spam.  I imagined forums being used for sharing food knowledge (recipes, ‘how do I use 3 lbs of beets?’), though you could also share community events and even barter goods.  The issue with forums, as ever, is moderation–how to make sure that people are not abusing the forum (or each other).  This qualifies as a high input/high possible return tool.
    • An online calendar.  Both for specific events, such as the aforementioned pig roast, and informal knowledge, like when tomatoes are expected to be ripe, would be great to have on a calendar.
    • Online registration for CSA membership and other event payment.  They do online registration already (if the shares haven’t already sold out).  They currently use paypal, and the fees can really eat into the farm’s profits, so they don’t see a bigger effort into this area being useful.
    • Classifieds.  Kinda like the forums but for money or free.  Same model as craigslist, but aimed at a self selected group of people.  Again, moderation and ensuring appropriate use are challenges.
    • Using a ready-setup community building site like ning could help accelerate online community building.  I also pointed them to the great Transition Colorado Ning site, so they could see what a related organization was doing.
    • Use wufoo (or email) to let users submit newsletter content.  Just sharing what other businesses and professions other CSA members are in can help knit the community tighter.
    • Advertising on the site.  They weren’t too keen on this, but I think that the correct type of advertising would be useful.  Again, possibly too high effort to be possible.
    • List of links to local resources.  They are already doing this, but should make it easier for people to request addition.
    • Write a blog.  This is a higher input version of the posterous suggestion, but I think it would be fascinating.

    Cure Organic Farm is a niche producer of vegetables, with a fiercely loyal CSA membership (shares almost always sell out within days of being open to the public) and proximity to Boulder, so their toolset will necessarily differ from another organization (imagine a farm just starting off, further out, with less reputation).  Hopefully some of these ideas and tools will be helpful to others thinking about strengthening offline community using online resources.

    [tags]community supported agriculture, online tools, offline community, pig roast[/tags]

    Social Media Technology and Society Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |