$100 To The First Five Accepted pMetrics Widgets

$500 to the first “killer” widget/plugin (as determined by Ryan) developed for pMetrics

Last night, Sean announced the launch of the pMetrics API.

The API opens up whole new possibilities for interpreting and displaying blog statistics. In the spirit of moving the pMetrics community forward, we are sponsoring five $100 prizes for the first five “fun and useful” widgets to be developed.

Here are the guidelines:

  1. Widgets that overlap in fundamental functionality will be competing on a first come, first serve basis
  2. A “fun” widget is one that people will want to put on their blog
  3. A “useful” widget is one that displays interesting information
  4. Widget submissions should come with links to live demos
  5. Widgets must meet our technical guidelines
  6. In submitting your widget, you are giving us permission to host and distribute your widget if we choose to.

Of course, “fun” and “useful” are subjective criteria, but we think you get the point. No widget nonsense, please;-)

You should submit your widgets in the pMetrics Widget Forum. The order in which you submit your widgets is the order in which they will be evaluated.

So let the fun begin!

12 thoughts on “$100 To The First Five Accepted pMetrics Widgets

  1. I’m reserving a $500 prize for the “killer” widget/plugin if anyone designs it. It will be a personal prize from me to you. No guarantees that the prize will be given out, but if someone designs a widget or plugin that blows me away, then I’ll gladly pay $500 for it.

  2. Ryan, Ahmed: That’s what I was talking about. Tweaking the “sparklines” graph WP plugin to show all the metrics for a PMetrics account in little wee graphs on a single page. It would allow anyone (advertiser or blog owner, etc.) to see at a glance all the important details in a visual format. I just have to figure out the best API output format to use and I’ll get started. (Unless someone beats me to it.)

  3. The pMetrics API is open to all for stats on the pMetrics site itself, no need to create dummy sites or anything, just play with our traffic data. You can get our site_id and sitekey from the examples section of the API docs. For example here is the last 30 visitors to pMetrics in XML:

    http://pmetrics.performancing.com/stats/api?site_id=1&sitekey=f8849aab9ef5&type=visitors-list&limit=30&output=xml

    Just play around with changing the type, limit, and output options and you’ll have everything you need for creating your own widget.

    I plan to release a demo widget sometime this week for site-rank, it won’t be amazing or anything, but will just be an example of how to do it. That would have been helpful for the release, but I’ve got other big things going on too and didn’t have time!

  4. Love the “advertisers eye candy” plugin idea. Someone should implement this ASAP. It would awesome to be able to create a way to display all the data an advertiser would want to see on a single page.

  5. Ryan, can you clarify? I’m building my own test site, where I’ll eventually open up access.

  6. If anyone needs a “test” site for developing widgets/plugins, let me know and I’ll hook you up.

  7. I’m working on a Performancing plugin for WordPress that will dynamically do the following:

    Create an Options page from which you can toggle Performancing widgets on/off
    Pull all new widgets into a database table so that users don’t have to update the plugin to get new widgets

  8. Ahmed: Great list. Makes me want to get back into coding.

    Regardless of coding language, all you need is a simple parser to understand the output of the API calls. Once you have that, you can pretty much do any of the functions listed above.

  9. 1) A widget that displays blog stats in a way that they can be shown to potential advertisers. What would this require?

    – Monthly summaries for the past 3 months
    – Daily averages
    – geolocation data (breakdown of traffic by country (top 10 sources))
    – RSS subscribers
    – site backlinks from Yahoo
    – site PR
    – delicious / Wikipedia links to site

    basically, any data that advertisers would like to look at.

    2) Live ‘Spy’ functionality on your blog?

    3) A widget that just looks at analyzing the demographics of the readership. Where they are from, what OS they use, what browsers they use, what time is the site visited the most, etc.

    4) Create a tag cloud of used search terms and link them to the blog’s search function, so that if you click on a tag you get a list of posts returning for a search carried out on your blog for that same term.

    5) show your pMetrics rank.

    6) Create a blog ranking system the way seomoz and eatonweb have and find a way to integrate live traffic data from pMetrics into it.

    Someone find me a plugin developer and I’ll beat 5 widgets out of them

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