July 10th, 2006 | One Comment

What’s On Your Dashboard?

Every day, the first thing I do when firing up the internet is load up what I like to call my “web dashboard”. This is a page (web design confession: layed out with tables) that pulls together a load of different stats from my various sites (and client sites), as well as having useful links to pages that I regularly frequent, usually each day, if not each hour (eg. Adsense, GMail).

On the stats side, I look at the number of hits for the day, and the monthly total, which are all pulled (via Javascript at the moment, but I’m looking to change to XML feeds from each site), from a home-brewed stats script that I knocked up in PHP, and is installed locally on each domain. It’s far from perfect, but it does give me what I think I want - a snapshot of activity, rather than having to delve into an over-whelming set of stats that a package such as Google Analytics might give me (that I’ve actually ended up checking about once every couple of weeks). If required, links from the dashboard allow me to easily look deeper into the stats at each site.

With the incoming referrals covered by my own stats scripts, I also have stats showing the outgoing clicks, thanks to MyBlogLog, which provides me with the top 5 outward links. I’m too stingy to upgrade to a pro account which would give me more than the top 5. I’m too busy to write my own script to do the same thing for nothing.

To remind me how few people read my blogs, I also use the FeedBurner “chicklets” - images that update every so often showing the number of readers of your RSS feed.

As well as the stats, I also have some nice little graphs, courtesy of TrendMapper. I don’t fully understand what they’re telling me, but by and large they all appear to be growing at a steady rate, which is fine by me. Once they are on the decline, I will begin to panic.

Stats such as Adsense earnings and emails in my GMail inbox are handled by Firefox extensions, although I guess these could also be built into the dashboard, for access from any computer with internet access.

My dashboard gives me a one-page view of all that is happening on my sites, but I’m intrigued to know if I’m missing out on something. Do you have a web dashboard too? If so, what’s on it?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 11:09 pm and is filed under WV4, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.