- Lots of people have issues with the gallery picker pulldown. I hear you!
- Lots of people brought up issues for large datasets (lots of galleries etc). I hear you!
Welcome to the Asylum Brad , it's good to read a post from someone who'se dealt with ReallyBigData before.
My one comment is that the issue of managing large numbers of galleries is not confined to stats - it's all over the place in SM. If you're going to 'fix' it here, please make it generic enough so it'll work over the rest of the site.
Thanks!
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Though others have echoed these before, I would like to reiterate three. The drill down for key data points and also for a single gallery picker with the option to select category or gallery. I'd like to add that mousing over those key points would give you some hints about the point--I'm not sure what you'd do. Maybe the top one or two?
Thanks for your efforts improving stats!
Moderator Journeys/Sports/Big Picture :: Need some help with dgrin?
Counting views of photos slideshows?
I'm curious, how are views of photos in slideshows handled in the counts? I would prefer that they not be included in counts, if only because if someone wanders away from their computer for a few hours or days and leaves a slideshow running, and each photo displayed was counted, it would create a misleading impression about the number of views.
I'm curious, how are views of photos in slideshows handled in the counts? I would prefer that they not be included in counts, if only because if someone wanders away from their computer for a few hours or days and leaves a slideshow running, and each photo displayed was counted, it would create a misleading impression about the number of views.
Unicode names cause trouble
Most of my gallery names include accented letters. Although the stats page is encoded in UTF-8 (according to the broweser), names show up bad - I guess something goes wrong in a step that's not UTF-8 aware. Screenshot from Firefox 3.5.6 on Ubuntu Linux:
- I also dislike flash. I took a long look at standards-based charting tools when planning this project and they just weren't quite there yet. I'm keeping my eye on a few toolkits and will definitely re-evaluate this situation as time becomes available and more smugmuggers migrate to newer browsers that can support in-browser charting.
- Lots of people have issues with the gallery picker pulldown. I hear you!
- Lots of people brought up issues for large datasets (lots of galleries etc). I hear you!
- We are implementing a new stats collection architecture at the same time we are rolling out this new front-end. The cutoff start date coincides with the date this architecture has good data in our database. Statistics for referrers is still being polished, and once that happens, the referrers tab which is now hidden will appear.
I'd like to be able to drill-down to a spike on the TOTAL Views tab to see what generated anomalies.
OH! And add the ability to EXPORT to a spreadsheet or CSV so I can calculate my own stats!
I think the stats has two important questions to answer--what and when. What was popular? And when was it popular?
'What' was popular is pretty easy to find using the "Popularity" tab. I was able to drill down to an individual photo easily. Two requests in this area--one, don't process stats on zero view galleries as they just make the list of galleries really long for those of us with over a 1000 galleries, and two, add the file name with the thumbnail when drilled down to the photo level.
'When' is something popular is too difficult to find in the current model. The current model of choosing what gallery to drill into manually is cumbersome and counter-intuitive. To be able to drill down based on a point on the graph would be much more easy. If you click on a point in the graph, you get a listing of the galleries for that date and the data on the graph automatically refreshes with a line for each gallery (this will need a cutoff as data from a hundred galleries would make a mess). If you click on a point on a gallery line, you get a graph of the top 5-10 photos in that gallery. This gives you the ability to see gallery trending and photo trending on the ones that affected a particular range of time.
Luckily, all the coding for these features already exist in the other tabs. It's just a matter of rearranging the interface. I think this is really doable in a short time.
Now, one thing that this stats model would not address is if you wanted to know stats on a particular gallery. For that, you could just leave the option in the gallery 'tools' menu, since most of the time when you're curious about a gallery's stats is when you're looking at it.
I would like to be able to see what albums are popular under a category. For example in my Category Travel there are three albums, I would like to be able to see side by side which album is most popular.
It would also be nice to be able to export the data.
Category level stats would also be useful. It would add another level of drill-down.
Exporting all stats data (like the sales data) would be terrific for those of us that build a spreadsheet with pivot tables and the like to analyze the data.
I'd really like to be able to select a category or sub-category rather than just a gallery.
A question I want stats to answer for me is "what in my site is getting the majority of hits in the last week or last month or last day"?
I'd like to be able to set a default date range that is always active when I first come to stats. For me, it would probably be the last week. It would also be nice to have shortcuts for last week, last month, last year without having to manually pick month/day/year for both starts and finish.
Is there any way to tell how many hits are direct links and how many are images viewed in a gallery page?
1. "Displaying from" In addition to the cool date picker, it should have some pre-defined options, perhaps in a drop-down for: this week, last week, this month, last month, last 6 months, last year, etc.
6. I'd like to be able to pick an end date in the future, for example to compare a previous month to the current month with the same scale.
7. How about highlighting Saturday and Sunday with a colored vertical band on the graphs, just to give sense of scale and also to see if weekends are busier.
8. For really long periods, how about alternating colors for months, again to give a sense of scale.
The date picker needs to have a field for simply entering a custom date. It's more efficient to type out a date from a previous year or two. Google Analytics' date picker comes to mind. It basically is both a custom date and clickable date in one box.
Once you can see the linked images, I'm sure I'll have some feedback on that as well. One point that I want to see is that the stats here don't duplicate what can be found in typical web stats packages from google, statcounter, sitemeter, etc. There may be some overlap in the case of referral links, but the data here should be more granular and more useful.
The new stats are already able to provide more information to me quicker. Vast improvement! :ivar
Most of my gallery names include accented letters. Although the stats page is encoded in UTF-8 (according to the broweser), names show up bad - I guess something goes wrong in a step that's not UTF-8 aware. Screenshot from Firefox 3.5.6 on Ubuntu Linux:
hi Kofa! this is Brad, the stats developer
Are you using an ubuntu font that is utf8-safe like ttf-dejavu or ttf-liberation? I am also a desktop linux user by the way. I use ttf-dejavu and set firefox to use this font even if the site asks for another font (I think we may be trying to set a font here that may not be directly supported on linux). On my browser (ff 3.5.7, arch linux), I can see utf8 set.
Please let me know if changing your font settings works...cross-platform support (including linux) is important to me!
Data in javascript source seems to be OK:
===
SM.stats.albumID2Info = {
[...]
{"AlbumID":9645901,"albumSmugKey":"EUo3Q","ImageCount":55,"name":"5. házassági évforduló, 2009.09.11-13."},
[...]
===
The two snippets are from the same FireBug source window, so it's not a font issue.
I do get a bunch of JS errors and warnings on the console [some of which are from FireBug itself]. I'll send them in e-mail.
Are you using an ubuntu font that is utf8-safe like ttf-dejavu or ttf-liberation? I am also a desktop linux user by the way. I use ttf-dejavu and set firefox to use this font even if the site asks for another font (I think we may be trying to set a font here that may not be directly supported on linux). On my browser (ff 3.5.7, arch linux), I can see utf8 set.
Thanks for the advice, but it still does not work. I've upgraded to Ubuntu 'karmic' (the latest release), Firefox 3.5.7, set the font as you suggested, but no luck. As I wrote earlier, even is source view, the data array is OK, the generated content is not. :-(
I'm a developer, but not much good in Javascript. If you can tell me where to set breakpoints to track content generation, I could try.
Thanks and my little input
I have been waiting SO long for this. Thanks so much!
Input for improvement:
In the process od selecting a gallery, it now appears to be all alphabetically based. Can we also have the option to have it "last modified" or "last created" based? Fir example, when I go to find a gallery for stats under my PORTRAITS AND FAMILY PACKAGES, I would like to be able to see all of the galleries of families that I most recently shot first, since that is usually the most important data.
Gallery scrolling is _way_ too slow
One of my subcategory's has 197 galleries in it.
When I went to "photo trends' to 'drill down' to a gallery in that subcategory, I'm presented with a tall, and very slowly moving list of gallery names.
No scroll bars I can grab and move one way or another, no way to enter a gallery name, etc. - just a slowly moving scrolling of names.
That alone makes trying to use 'photo trends' completely useless for this subcategory.
This is an issue that needs to be addressed for any SM gallery picker that behaves in this manner.
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Data in javascript source seems to be OK:
===
SM.stats.albumID2Info = {
[...]
{"AlbumID":9645901,"albumSmugKey":"EUo3Q","ImageCount":55,"name":"5. házassági évforduló, 2009.09.11-13."},
[...]
===
The two snippets are from the same FireBug source window, so it's not a font issue.
I do get a bunch of JS errors and warnings on the console [some of which are from FireBug itself]. I'll send them in e-mail.
Thanks, and keep up the great work!
Kofa
Thanks Kofa, this is indeed a bug and I will look into it.
Let me first say that this is a really good 1st step. Thanks guys. I apologize for not being able to read through all of the responses so I apologize if this has already been mentioned. It appears that the stats are gallery based. For me, this is not very helpful.
I need to see stats at a category or subcategory level. I shoot weddings. I set up a subcategory for each client wedding, then post various galleries (Getting Ready, The Ceremony, The Reception, etc) inside of their sub-category.
It would be great to see stats at this level. At least at a subcategory level.
Maybe you guys can offer us a choice of how we want to see our stats, via a drop down box.
Statistics Level>
Gallery
Sub-Category
Category
Then display the graph.
You could utilize the tree navigation hierarchy you've setup for pricing, where you drill down to what you want, then hit a button called, Get Stats.
We need a way to exclude certain galleries from ALL stats... I just found that my second most popualr gallery was responsible for over 1/3 of all my views... However that gallery is my "website GFX" gallery with all the page elements like backgrounds, corners of boxes, overlays etc that are presented several times for every page loaded.
Not being able to exclude these utterly pollutes the stats for me and makes them worse that useless.
Me too plus one more
I too would like to be able to drill-down on each day to see the photos viewed that day without having to go through each gallery.
I would also like so see the thumb stats too for popularity. Most viewed is great, I know when someone comments, but I would like to know the number of thumb up or downs a photo has. I don't care who thumbed it. A total by day would be nice but I could live with just a total.
One tweak: on the Total Views tab, it would be great to be able to click a data point and get a drill-down of the stats for that day directly, like this:
The Flash requirement
There's currently no Flash plugin for 64-bit Linux available for the general public. And the "alpha" release I have setup for testing purposes chokes on the new stats. In fact it crashes the browser.
So the question is why are you requiring Flash to view a simple chart?
Good Work!
I think this is great! Thanks! I tried to look through all the posts. . . In addition to referrer stats, it would also be nice to get ISP stats, along with the hit dates, etc., as you would get on Stat Counter or other stat site.
Great start!
This is a huge improvement! Your popularity column would fit it's name better if in addition to number of views, it also showed number of thumbs up/down, and perhaps the number of purchases. In general I believe a single statistic is rarely useful. This information would be very helpful in gauging what our customers are interested in.
re: Stats overhaul beta
Wow, this is great! One request: Instead of drop down menus, is there anyway to select clickable icons instead? Drop downs can be a bit tedious. For example, when you get to the gallery details, I would prefer to click on a gallery, or even select multiple galleries, then arrow through the graphs once I'm done. Selecting from a drop down menu each time is more time consuming.
I was wondering if it might be possible to add the functionality of seeing stats for a subcategory. When we put up our weddings we create multiple galleries within a subcategory (one subcat per client) and I'd love to see the stats for all of their galleries without having to go to each one of them separately.
Just a thought...
Also +1 on thinking that drop down boxes can be difficult to use... check boxes might be easier?
Comments
My one comment is that the issue of managing large numbers of galleries is not confined to stats - it's all over the place in SM. If you're going to 'fix' it here, please make it generic enough so it'll work over the rest of the site.
Thanks!
Though others have echoed these before, I would like to reiterate three. The drill down for key data points and also for a single gallery picker with the option to select category or gallery. I'd like to add that mousing over those key points would give you some hints about the point--I'm not sure what you'd do. Maybe the top one or two?
Thanks for your efforts improving stats!
I'm curious, how are views of photos in slideshows handled in the counts? I would prefer that they not be included in counts, if only because if someone wanders away from their computer for a few hours or days and leaves a slideshow running, and each photo displayed was counted, it would create a misleading impression about the number of views.
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Most of my gallery names include accented letters. Although the stats page is encoded in UTF-8 (according to the broweser), names show up bad - I guess something goes wrong in a step that's not UTF-8 aware. Screenshot from Firefox 3.5.6 on Ubuntu Linux:
I like these suggestions: I think the stats has two important questions to answer--what and when. What was popular? And when was it popular?
'What' was popular is pretty easy to find using the "Popularity" tab. I was able to drill down to an individual photo easily. Two requests in this area--one, don't process stats on zero view galleries as they just make the list of galleries really long for those of us with over a 1000 galleries, and two, add the file name with the thumbnail when drilled down to the photo level.
'When' is something popular is too difficult to find in the current model. The current model of choosing what gallery to drill into manually is cumbersome and counter-intuitive. To be able to drill down based on a point on the graph would be much more easy. If you click on a point in the graph, you get a listing of the galleries for that date and the data on the graph automatically refreshes with a line for each gallery (this will need a cutoff as data from a hundred galleries would make a mess). If you click on a point on a gallery line, you get a graph of the top 5-10 photos in that gallery. This gives you the ability to see gallery trending and photo trending on the ones that affected a particular range of time.
Luckily, all the coding for these features already exist in the other tabs. It's just a matter of rearranging the interface. I think this is really doable in a short time.
Now, one thing that this stats model would not address is if you wanted to know stats on a particular gallery. For that, you could just leave the option in the gallery 'tools' menu, since most of the time when you're curious about a gallery's stats is when you're looking at it. Category level stats would also be useful. It would add another level of drill-down.
Exporting all stats data (like the sales data) would be terrific for those of us that build a spreadsheet with pivot tables and the like to analyze the data. The date picker needs to have a field for simply entering a custom date. It's more efficient to type out a date from a previous year or two. Google Analytics' date picker comes to mind. It basically is both a custom date and clickable date in one box.
Once you can see the linked images, I'm sure I'll have some feedback on that as well. One point that I want to see is that the stats here don't duplicate what can be found in typical web stats packages from google, statcounter, sitemeter, etc. There may be some overlap in the case of referral links, but the data here should be more granular and more useful.
The new stats are already able to provide more information to me quicker. Vast improvement!
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Are you using an ubuntu font that is utf8-safe like ttf-dejavu or ttf-liberation? I am also a desktop linux user by the way. I use ttf-dejavu and set firefox to use this font even if the site asks for another font (I think we may be trying to set a font here that may not be directly supported on linux). On my browser (ff 3.5.7, arch linux), I can see utf8 set.
Please let me know if changing your font settings works...cross-platform support (including linux) is important to me!
thanks for the quick response.
Data in javascript source seems to be OK:
===
SM.stats.albumID2Info = {
[...]
{"AlbumID":9645901,"albumSmugKey":"EUo3Q","ImageCount":55,"name":"5. házassági évforduló, 2009.09.11-13."},
[...]
===
However, the generated content is not:
===
<a id="albumpopular_9645901" href="?min=1260432001&max=1263024001&AlbumID=9645901&stat=5">5. házassági évforduló, 2009.09.11-13.</a>
===
The two snippets are from the same FireBug source window, so it's not a font issue.
I do get a bunch of JS errors and warnings on the console [some of which are from FireBug itself]. I'll send them in e-mail.
Thanks, and keep up the great work!
Kofa
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
Thanks for the advice, but it still does not work. I've upgraded to Ubuntu 'karmic' (the latest release), Firefox 3.5.7, set the font as you suggested, but no luck. As I wrote earlier, even is source view, the data array is OK, the generated content is not. :-(
I'm a developer, but not much good in Javascript. If you can tell me where to set breakpoints to track content generation, I could try.
I have been waiting SO long for this. Thanks so much!
Input for improvement:
In the process od selecting a gallery, it now appears to be all alphabetically based. Can we also have the option to have it "last modified" or "last created" based? Fir example, when I go to find a gallery for stats under my PORTRAITS AND FAMILY PACKAGES, I would like to be able to see all of the galleries of families that I most recently shot first, since that is usually the most important data.
FYI: I get the same (bad display) using Google Chrome and Opera (both on Ubuntu), too. What's more, I get the same result on Windows XP, IE7.
One of my subcategory's has 197 galleries in it.
When I went to "photo trends' to 'drill down' to a gallery in that subcategory, I'm presented with a tall, and very slowly moving list of gallery names.
No scroll bars I can grab and move one way or another, no way to enter a gallery name, etc. - just a slowly moving scrolling of names.
That alone makes trying to use 'photo trends' completely useless for this subcategory.
This is an issue that needs to be addressed for any SM gallery picker that behaves in this manner.
Thanks Kofa, this is indeed a bug and I will look into it.
thanks
brad
I need to see stats at a category or subcategory level. I shoot weddings. I set up a subcategory for each client wedding, then post various galleries (Getting Ready, The Ceremony, The Reception, etc) inside of their sub-category.
It would be great to see stats at this level. At least at a subcategory level.
Maybe you guys can offer us a choice of how we want to see our stats, via a drop down box.
Statistics Level>
Sub-Category
Category
You could utilize the tree navigation hierarchy you've setup for pricing, where you drill down to what you want, then hit a button called, Get Stats.
Some ideas for you. Keep up the great work!
http://www.fernandogonzalez.net
I totally agree with this! Good point.
http://www.fernandogonzalez.net
I too would like to be able to drill-down on each day to see the photos viewed that day without having to go through each gallery.
I would also like so see the thumb stats too for popularity. Most viewed is great, I know when someone comments, but I would like to know the number of thumb up or downs a photo has. I don't care who thumbed it. A total by day would be nice but I could live with just a total.
Thanks for the hard work.
Greg
Thank you so much and it looks great.
~Max
http://maxroper.smugmug.com
Its definitely a improvement over the other stats and I agree that knowing where the traffic is coming from would be cool as well.
Thanks
www.jonbakerphotography.com
There's currently no Flash plugin for 64-bit Linux available for the general public. And the "alpha" release I have setup for testing purposes chokes on the new stats. In fact it crashes the browser.
So the question is why are you requiring Flash to view a simple chart?
EDIT - I had a comment here about a referrer report, but after reading through the comments I see it's been asked several times and there's already been a response too.
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I think this is great! Thanks! I tried to look through all the posts. . . In addition to referrer stats, it would also be nice to get ISP stats, along with the hit dates, etc., as you would get on Stat Counter or other stat site.
Looking forward to the final version!
This is a huge improvement! Your popularity column would fit it's name better if in addition to number of views, it also showed number of thumbs up/down, and perhaps the number of purchases. In general I believe a single statistic is rarely useful. This information would be very helpful in gauging what our customers are interested in.
Keep up the great work!
AWESOME!
:ivar:ivar:ivar:ivar:ivar:ivar
"Don't worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition."
-- Abraham Lincoln
Wow, this is great! One request: Instead of drop down menus, is there anyway to select clickable icons instead? Drop downs can be a bit tedious. For example, when you get to the gallery details, I would prefer to click on a gallery, or even select multiple galleries, then arrow through the graphs once I'm done. Selecting from a drop down menu each time is more time consuming.
Thanks!!
Kabrina
Etsy.com/shop/kabrina |NotManhattan.com | NotManhattan.smugmug.com
The secret of success is constancy of purpose. -Benjamin Disraeli
Hello,
Thanks for the new stats upgrade... looking nice
I was wondering if it might be possible to add the functionality of seeing stats for a subcategory. When we put up our weddings we create multiple galleries within a subcategory (one subcat per client) and I'd love to see the stats for all of their galleries without having to go to each one of them separately.
Just a thought...
Also +1 on thinking that drop down boxes can be difficult to use... check boxes might be easier?
Thanks!
~Chris