samuel.bowles.es

I have been using Movable Type since I switched from hand-coding my site in late 2001 early 2002. I have always loved Movable Type and despite some rough spots when they went commercial I always felt I had made the right choice. More recently however I began to look toward the greener pastures of WordPress - they had pages, a more active community, and the momentum that Movable Type seemed to be losing. Then came MT4, Six Apart’s latest release, bringing with it many of the features I longed for from WordPress, the promise of an open source release (and the community involvement that can foster), and a much improved interface.

Today I am once again happy to be using Movable Type. One feature in particular has caught my attention: the dashboard. When I first visited the updated administration panel I was impressed by it’s design but underwhelmed by it’s usefulness. The blog stats panel is cool looking but I don’t post frequently enough for an entries graph to be particularly interesting. Some plugins are beginning to appear offering more useful stats like visits and feed hits but I already have Mint, Google Analytics, and Feedburner for those. It doesn’t feel much more convenient to flip between MT dashboard tabs and browser tabs to view this information.

I believe however there’s untapped potential in Movable Type’s dashboard. Movable Type has information about my content that none of the above stats applications are currently tracking. It knows when I posted each entry and it knows how I’ve categorized and tagged them. Currently MT’s dashboard graphs present isolated data (entries OR comments OR tags, etc) but the real power of these graphs could be found in presenting relationships between this data.

The Movable Type Visitors / Entries Dashboard Widget

I would like to present an idea on how these relationships might work in practice. I’ve put together two screenshots of a theoretical plugin and I will describe how this plugin might work. I’ve yet to dig into the plugin APIs to figure out exactly how to do this and I have a feeling the current flash widget used to present the graphs would need to be updated to support these multi-data views (Byrne?). I’m hoping that someone much smarter than I will take it upon themselves to create this plugin but if not I may have some research and coding to do.

The goal of this proposed plug-in is to allow you to see what types of content are attracting the most visitors. In my example I have a blog that includes three types of content: articles, link-list links, and photos. I have distinguished these types of content by category but the architecture of the plugin would allow you a great deal of flexibility to track types of content in ways that are meaningful to you using either categories or tags.

In this first screenshot you see the widget this plugin would place on your dashboard. The graph shows comparative data: visits above and entries below. You will notice a reaction in traffic to one entry in particular posted around August 6th. This entry is blue denoting it’s status as an article. Below the graphs is a running referral log color coded like the graph above. Blue: articles, Red: links, Green, photos.

The second screen shot shows the plugin’s administration screen under Preferences > Plugins. I choose to use Mint as the data source for this plugin because of it’s instant feedback. While Google Analytics provides powerful and deep data it’s nowhere near as fresh as something local like Mint. The first preference asks for the address of Mint’s “Newst Unique” feed, an RSS feed including referral information. There may be a better way to plugin to Mint’s API but this seemed the most obvious route to me.

Once you have setup a data source for the plugin it will need details on how to mine meaning from your categorization or tagging ontology. This is done by allowing you to select as many colors as you want and assign them to a group of tags or categories. The only limitation is that a given category or tag must be assigned to only one color.

And that’s it - simple as pie, sorry, bar graphs. If you do decide to implement something like this I’d love to know - so I can install it. If no one shows interest in the idea I’ll probably start playing around with some code in a month or two to see what I can come up with.

Update:

I thought I remembered reading something about the slider widget in Movable Type being borrowed from someplace else. Sure enough all of the flash programming was done by Measure Map (now owned by Google) and released under a Creative Commons license. This definitely looks like one of the larger challenges to implementing my plugin concept. It might even be better to replace the flash object rather than try to customize it.