lifestats, part II
Notice anything new about the page?
Look to the right over there…
After Randy’s comment on my post about being inspired to keep track of some life stats for 2007, I was further inspired to put up some of the stats in more or less real time. So there they are. Are there any other stats you want to see? The full list of stats that I’m tracking:
- emails sent (home/ work)
- miles travelled
- wikipedia pages read
- beers consumed
- work days
- photos taken (digital/ film)
- albums purchased
- concerts attended
- books read
- movies seen (theater/ netflix)
- hours of TV
- haircuts
- shaves
- miles biked
- miles ran
- miles swam
Originally I was going to do this literally updating every time you loaded the page, but that made the page really slowly (even slower than it loads already), so I decided to write up a caching system where it only loads the new data every six hours. I might adjust this if it makes sense to.
The script checks to see if the cache is older than 6 hours old and if so pulls some data from a google spreadsheet. Otherwise, it writes the old data into the html that you see on the right. I’ll probably write up a full post or a instructable of how I did all this sometime when I have more time.
I’m going Web2.0 all over this place!@
January 19th, 2007 at 4:20 am
add to the list: pants dizzy
January 19th, 2007 at 5:43 am
How are you keeping track of some of this stuff? For example, how are you keeping track of emails sent and Wikipedia pages? Did you write a program to keep track of this for you or are you keeping a manual count somehow? I like the idea of keeping track of some of these things myself, but in the absence of a convenient system for managing the data, it seems like a lot of annoying manual record keeping.
January 19th, 2007 at 8:39 am
For email, I go into my sent-mail folder and count (or subtract–pine has number for the emails. For wikipedia, I go to Firefox’s history. You can sort by date and site accessed, so I just look for en.wikipedia.org and count how many I’ve been through. I don’t even need to ‘keep up’ necessarily because it’ll keep track for 9 days.
I manually enter all the information into a Google Spreadsheet.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:44 am
You should write a program that does all that counting for you. You could set it as a cron job and every hour it checks to see how many emails you sent and how many wikipedia entries you viewed. That would be sweet. I’m amazed that you’ve sent that many emails already. So far this year, I have sent a grand total of 45. That’s an average of just over 2 per day. Once the spring semester gets underway, I’m sure that will go up, but for right now, it’s pretty nice.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:53 am
You also seem to have a raging wikipedia addiction. Does that number include search pages and disambiguation pages? If so, I would suggest that you not count those, since they’re not really articles. In my browser history from yesterday, I have 5 pages under en.wikipedia.org. One is a disambiguation page; three are search results pages and only one is an actual article. Including those pages would make it seem like I read 5 times as many articles yesterday as I actually did.
January 19th, 2007 at 11:22 am
44 emails per day that say only “bagina!” or “boobies!” accounts for 792 of those emails.
January 19th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Thank you Jesse. I didn’t want to have to point that out.
Also, I want emails with the subject line “boobies” to be a separate sub-category.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Colin, I was counting disambiguation pages but not search pages. I usually don’t search wikipedia itself because their search sucks. I usually just google whatever I want and wikipedia and it’ll come up. I say wikipedia pages accessed, because often I’ll just be looking for one or two facts or pieces of info and won’t actually read the entire article. I have read bits of all those wikipedia pages. Also because of my counting method, it’s possible to count the same page twice (multiple days, or on both home and work computers), but from what I’ve noticed that’s probably less than 5% of the pages, quite possibly even less.
Jesse and Libs, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Also, I’m astounded by the number of emails I send. I think it’s a bit high because I was organizing this 60th Anniversary Marathon and some other things for KZSU.
I do tend to send a lot of short emails in conversation-like threads. Also, I’m a pretty fast typist (especially when spelling, etc. isn’t all that important) and the keyboard-commands for pine are second nature to me.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
oh, you know /exactly/ what we are talking about…
January 20th, 2007 at 6:03 am
You go, Web 2.0! But pictures taken 0? A day is wasted if a picture is not taken, I say. Now I’m curious as to how many emails I’ve sent out. Do you count per email or per sender? (like if you send one email but it goes out to 20 people is that one email or 20?)
SL, who does not want to clean the snow off her car and so is using Web 2.0 as a procrastination tool…
January 20th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Part of adding the pictures taken: 0 was to shame myself into taking some. One email to 20 people counts as one email.
January 20th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Well, and so, what are you waiting for? February? And dear Lord, that is a lot of emails…it’s not even, well, February yet!!
January 20th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
kilograms of lard consumed
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:01 am
Good job on the implementation. (Note: one of the reasons I wanted to use a database is because its faster to connect to… not like I do this for a living or anything).
Anyway, I like what Colin says, about automating the counting. If you use firefox you might be able to use Slogger (a “browser logger”) to accomplish that, along with some perl or something. If you’re crafy enough, it could probably even auto-update your spreadsheet. But at the very least, it could probably just give you your current count at a moments notice. You have quite a bit more motivation than I if you keep up at collecting these stats throughout the year… although having a blog[h] at all is already more motivation than I…
Also, since you have a lot of exercise related stats in there, another interesting interesting stat could be your weight, or possibly an offset from your 1/1/07 weight, or something.
Nonetheless, cool little addition to your blog. May I also suggest that you change the format of those stats? The look like links now. Maybe just get rid of the orange box and/or italicize
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:03 am
Oh, its already italicized. Well, you get the point.
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:06 am
It was italicized because you don’t know how to close your <em> tags—hint, it’s not with </a>. Don’t worry, I fixed it.
Finding the number of wikipedia pages and emails sent is one of the easier parts to do/ remember because it’s stored for multiple days afterwards and is accurate. Number of beers or miles driven is a much harder one.
I think having a whole separate mysql database that was checked every single time this page loaded would have been overkill. The system now is easy to use (for me) and works well.
I worked for a couple hours getting the look of those lifestats right.
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:24 am
haha, that’s funny. I didn’t think they were italicized before I posted. I wonder can I do this?
Doesn’t all of WP or whatever this is work off a mysql database? Aren’t all the comments pulled from a database?
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:25 am
Oops, forgot to ‘sign in’, and apparently I can’t.
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:27 am
Feel free to delete these,
What about an open heading tag?
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:29 am
Well at least its smart enough to filter out some (open?) tags.