Metrics Development Community

By Chris GarrettAdvertising

Well Metrics has only just emerged blinking into the sunlight but already we are seeing great community support. We have community members working on ways Metrics can support blog software not already listed, lots of suggestions for new features and members helping each other set up their blogs. Exactly what we hoped would happen, thank you all.

Any time soon you should expect to see the first release of our Metrics API which will allow developers to create some cool plugins, reports and widgets that work with Metrics data. Before we release the API I thought it would be good to point out a great example of a WordPress plugin you can get already.


Dave Reid has built a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add the Metrics code to your blog.

Features:

* Only one click or enable/disable.
* No need to digg around and modify your template files and no additional configuration needed.

Compatibility:

PMetrics works with WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.

As well as this plugin, James had put together a wordpress theme for metrics but it seems he has pulled it while he works on it. Petition him to bring it back if you like, heh.

Do let us know if you know of something or you are working on something that we have missed and thanks to everyone who is supporting us!

20 thoughts on “Metrics Development Community”

  2. Yeah, I’d love to collect a list of PMetrics wishes, but also make sure that I don’t do something that you P-bodys are already putting into the next edition of PMetrics. (If you ever watched the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, you’ll get the reference

  3. Before implementing moving averages you are allowed to have a healthy refreshment higher on your priority list 🙂

  4. Moving averages is an interesting but advanced feature, lots of other people have ideas what we should work on too! I guess we all have ideas what the priorities are, heh

  5. Raj, that really sounds good. What a pity that I don’t use WP 🙂
    PM me if you want to show off some pre-alpha!

    In the meantime you could motivate the p.com team further on with ‘moving averages’ … I’d like to have that and I also mentioned it a couple of times. I used a Yahoo stock graph to illustrate my wishes. Maybe somebody didn’t like that 🙂

  6. Markus: I’m hoping to include FB stats in my PMetrics WP plugins. I’m also working on a RIA (Rich Internet Application) interface using Ajax. I’m using a “mature” Ajax dev environment, but it’s not free. So I’ll have to look into pricing and see whether I can afford it or not. If I can, you’ll be able to choose between WordPress plugins and the Ajax web app.

    On the other hand, the community edition of the Ajax IDE is free. Anyone wanting to use my free code could download the IDE, install it on their desktop/ laptop, along with my code (if that doesn’t violate terms). I’m being discreet on purpose. I have a bad habit of announcing things and not doing them if I announce too many details.

    I already have a mockup of the Ajax RIA (ARIA :?) for viewing PMetrics, but I’m waiting to see if the PMetrics API changes before I commit some scarce hours. But I will be announcing some details of the plugins, once I’m close to release. Ahmed and I are doing these plugins together, and we have to be in sync.

  7. And I am not sure that PMetrics should reinvent the wheel. Maybe PMetrics one day can use the FB API to include the FB stats.

  8. It’s not impossible to obtain donna, but it’s tricky, and we dont currently provide it.

    If you really need to know, use feedburner and 302 to the new feed.

    On sites i dont use FB on i just take the bloglines subscribers number and multiply by 3 and that gives me a pretty good rough count.

  9. Is there any way to determine subscriber counts and report on those? In other words, show me how many are subscribed to the feed via bloglines, my yahoo, etc? Or is this impossible data to obtain?

  12. Chris, could you drop some words about the meaning of the lights into the basic installation routine?

    A small comment about this …

    1. You tell PMetrics about your blog.
    2. It shows up in the PMetrics blog list.
    3. On the far right there is this colorful signal. Green means ‘data is collected’. I think ‘orange is ‘no data during the last four hours’ (to be confirmed). And as Chris pointed out a red signal shows you that something is wrong.

    And NO, no info is shown on your page as PMetrics is a server side service and so the server is the qualified source to tell you if it is working. You just have to make sure that the script is or the scriptlets are in the right place on your specific blog system as mentioned during the installation.

    Hope that helps in ‘debugging’ the installation with these lights for newcomers.

  14. Wilson, we already have the “light” system to let you know if the script is installed correctly? A red light means it isn’t.

    Thanks for the feedback on the adsense, we are certainly going to build up the advertising tracking aspect, watch this space.

  15. Nick: good idea, I suppose I could do that.

    kpmartin: Sure, but to not violate the Google TOS, I’ll have to post a version without my data. What’s more, you’ll have to reconstruct the graphs yourself.

    What I’ll do, on my Performancing blog, is post an explanation of MMAs and the spreadsheets (9-10) that I use to do advanced forecasting on my blogs. Please give me until Tuesday afternoon (North American time zones) as I cannot do it before then.

  16. MMA seems very interesting. Can you share the spreadsheet you use? Is there a good resource to learn more about it?

  17. Hi Chris!

    Thanks for making the performancing metrics available! Here are some of my notes when i used Performancing Metrics.

    It took a bit of coding to incorporate the wordpress code into my blog, and i kept on adding it to my sidebar code. When nothing was happening, i re-read your instructions and figured out that i had to go into the theme and edit the “footer” just below the tag. I kept on hitting the refresh button to see if it works.

    I just found out, that it works, but there was no visual indication in my blog that the code had already been installed. May i suggest a bit of added code to show an icon or something , that will let us know if performancing metrics was successfully or properly installed?

    Also, a suggestion for future enhancement would be to show users the “google analytic”-like Goal tracking. this may sound weird, and i apologise in advance for this, but wouldn’t it be great if webmasters can figure more details about the adsense clicks that occured on their blogs?

    1. What or who the referrer was that resulted in the adsense click
    2. What blog article or which site in the blog was the visitor on when the adsense click occured.
    3. What the specific adsense ad was

  18. Perhaps if there are experts out there in particular blogs who know the most effective ways to incorporate the special Metrics’ tags into a given blog, you could include that in the instructions that appear after you add a new blog?

    Harry

  19. I’ve just taken a look at the new beta for PFF with metrics support, and it rocks!

    It may be a simple API right now, but you can still do some pretty neat stuff with it. How about letting the WP plugin grow as the API does Raj?

  20. I’m hoping to have a complex forecasting plugin for PMetrics (in WordPress) which will show you trends for each of your blog metrics. But I have to wait for the final version of the API.

    I’ve been using a statistical technique called Multiple Moving Averages (MMA) on my own blogs. But I’ve been doing it manually, in a spreadsheet, then graphing the trendlines in short- and long-term periods. It’s an extremely useful technique used by day-traders in the stock market, but it’s also useful for long-term predictions.

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