Project Eadrax, one of the main things I’ve been dedicating my time to nowadays is currently stalled. This is because to continue we really need a design. Unfortunately our designer promised more than he could deliver and it’s been a waiting game for quite a while now. He asked to be given one more week (until the 24th) and I really hope we have a design to present then. Worst case scenario we need another webdesigner, or at least somebody who’ll help me on icons and work with me on making the new design.

Meanwhile I wanted to showcase some of the new features we see in Eadrax that the old version didn’t have: the Eadrax Dashboard Charts. To be honest, this feature was actually implemented a few weeks back and were given the honours of having the second reported (and now fixed) bug. I was wondering what sort of statistics would make Eadrax an interesting system to use, at the same time subconciously persuading users to contribute content

The first is the newsfeed. This is exactly like other systems, such as Facebook. It basically says what’s been going on with the people you are tracking and the projects you are subscribed to. It looks quite ugly now, as like I said before, we need a design. All that exists now the barebones system. If you’re wondering about the “asdf”-like text, that’s because I simply dumped in some data in the database to see if it worked – and yes, it did Of course, you might spot some errors here – for example how can I subscribe to my own project? How can I track myself? This is obviously impossible! Actually yes it is, but I just dumped in data to make it look realistic – it’s all fake.

The second are statistics about your own popularity. Who is tracking you and who are subscribed to your projects. It breaks it down per project for subscribes and we can probably display this information similar to how your “followers” are displayed on Twitter. Or we could be more original – ideas are welcome! So as you can see above, I have two projects, the “Eadrax” project and the “wefwef” project.

Now it gets more interesting. This shows how many updates you have submitted each week for the past 8 weeks. I simply added some dummy information and didn’t go too far back in time, so obviously when you actually start to use the website these graphs will look much, much more interesting. So according to this, I did nothing until the 6th of July, did a decent amount of work during that week, but slacked a bit during the next week.

Another graph shows how many comments I have given, and how many comments on my stuff I have received. We want to encourage feedback as an important part of this system, and we hope lots of comments (and constructive, too) turn up. Also, it’s quite fun to have two lines on one graph

This graph is straight and to the point – it tells you if people are actually looking at your stuff. Obviously here the statistics don’t add up. For example, by the 13th of July I did not get any views, yet somebody commented on my stuff – how is that possible? This is because I made up values in the database just for testing purposes, of course – not because my code is buggy (crappy maybe, but I think it works)

Now we enter the lovely world of pie charts. This shows you how many people are subscribed to each project. Again, the math doesn’t add up – previously I had only mentioned two projects, the “Eadrax” and the “wefwef” project – so what is the “Trackers” project? In fact, I also mentioned that you can both “track” people and “subscribe” to individual projects. It therefore goes without saying that if you are tracking somebody, you are automatically subscribed to all of their projects. I hope that makes sense, and I hope that really makes this pie chart useful. For example, I can see that people really like the Eadrax project – perhaps I should update it more.

This pie chart shows kudos (the plural of kudos is kudos, whoops!) per project. If somebody likes what you did on an update, they can “kudos” it – this simply adds them up. As you can see here, some of our kudos belong in the “Uncategorised” section – that means not all updates need to be categorised within projects. This is useful if you are simply doing random testing or doodles that isn’t part of something major. What’s vital about this chart is that you can see it keeps the same colour codes, so you don’t get mixed up. Here we can see that even though it seems as though two people are notified when I update “wefwef” and only one (the person who is tracking me) is notified when I submit an uncategorised update, the uncategorised ones seem a lot more popular. Again, this is all just fake data I don’t really have a project called “wefwef”.

Finally we can see our own personal activity on our projects. As we can see here, even though I am equally active on both Eadrax and wefwef, Eadrax is significantly more popular as seen from our previous chart. I spend most of my time on random crap, but only one person out of a potential four people are notified about it – but rightly so that person seems to be a big fan of my random crap work, and so I get the most kudos on my uncategorised stuff. Useful, eh?

This data will probably be presented in some sort of grid layout once we have a proper user interface – but until then it’s just random images spewed here and there. However I wanted to show you what it’s looking like now and see if you like it!

Related posts:

1. Progress on Eadrax
2. After the WIPUP release, the stats are in.
3. Final call for Eadrax testers.
4. Pre-alpha Eadrax Testing Begun!
5. The WIPUP 21.02.10 stats are out.