{"id":650,"date":"2010-11-07T16:24:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-07T22:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=650"},"modified":"2015-01-28T14:28:21","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T20:28:21","slug":"useful-tools-statsmix-makes-it-easy-to-build-a-dashboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/650","title":{"rendered":"Useful Tools: StatsMix makes it easy to build a dashboard"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven’t been to a BDNT<\/a> lately, but still get their email announcements.\u00a0 In August, all the 2010 TechStars folks<\/a> presented, and were listed in the email.\u00a0 I took a look at each company, and signed up when the company seemed to be doing something cool.\u00a0 I always want to capture my preferred username, mooreds!<\/p>\n

One that was very interesting to me was StatsMix<\/a>; I signed up for their beta.\u00a0 On Nov 1, I got invited to sign up.\u00a0 Wahoo!<\/p>\n

Statsmix lets users build custom dashboards.\u00a0 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<\/a>).\u00a0 I’ve been playing with Piwik, an open source analytics toolkit<\/a>, but Statsmix offers a slicker solution.<\/p>\n

They have made it dead simple to create a custom dashboard for users.\u00a0 They offer integration with, at this time, 29 services (twitter<\/a>, mailchimp<\/a>, youtube<\/a>, Google Analytics<\/a>, etc).\u00a0 I could not find an up to date list of integration services outside of their webapplication!\u00a0 The best I could find was this list from September<\/a>.\u00a0 While the integration interface is slick, the data integration is rudimentary.\u00a0 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<\/a>); you can track the number of likes on Facebook, but not the number of comments.<\/p>\n

The real power of StatsMix comes from the ease of integration with your own custom stats.\u00a0 They offer an API which is accessible via REST<\/a>.\u00a0 This means that you can push information from your database to a beautiful looking dashboard with shell scripts and a cron job.\u00a0 Very cool!\u00a0 It would be nice to see a plugin for Magento<\/a> or other ecommerce vendors; I recently had a client, The Game Frame<\/a>, that would have been a great fit for this type of dashboard, since it aggregates beyond what the ecommerce software provides.<\/p>\n

Other cool features:<\/p>\n