There are several simple plugins for adding sparklines to WordPress websites including:
- Activity Sparks plugin by Greg Jackson which adds some configurable functionality for adding sparklines to WordPress sites including for posts and comments as well as for tracking categories/tags.
- Sparkplug by Beau Lebens has similarity to the Activity Sparks plugin (above), but with a slightly older looking and somewhat less refined output.
At present, I’m using the Activity Sparks plugin in my sidebar to display the recent activity on my site in terms of my posting frequency and the comment frequency. One chart provides the daily activity on my site over the past 3 months while the other provides the monthly activity over the past 5 years.
When on particular category pages, you can see the posting velocity for those particular categories in these respective time periods. While on the homepage and other miscellaneous pages, you can see the aggregate numbers for the website.
Generally I don’t care very much about the statistics, but in aggregate they can sometimes be fun to look at. As quick examples, I can tell roughly by looking at the 5 year time span when I added certain posting features to my website or that time my site got taken down by HackerNews.
hat tip to Khürt Williams who reminded me I needed to circle back around and finish of a small piece of this project and document it.
Hi Chris, Activity Sparks was interesting. I installed and configured it. But soon after the widget appeared on my website, I got an alert from Firefox (I test my site updates in Firefox) that my communication was no longer private. It took me seconds to realise that Activity Sparks uses Facebook tracking cookies and a few more seconds to deactivate and delete Activity Sparks from my host.
Using Activity Sparks would mean violating my website’s GDPR policy.
Interesting discovery. I’ll have to look through the code and excise the portion that does that. I’m curious why it’s doing that?
In addition to the sparkline graphs I’ve got in the sidebar of my website, I’ve recently been looking at alternate ways to indicate the posting activity on my own website.
“Monthly activity over 5 years” for both posting activity as well as commenting activity on my website.
Calendar Heatmaps
Yesterday I was contemplating calendar heatmaps which are probably best known from the user interface of GitHub which relatively shows how active someone is on the website. I’ve discovered that JetPack for WordPress provides a similar functionality on the back end (in blue instead of green), but sadly doesn’t make it available for display on the front end of websites. I’ve filed a feature request to see if it’s something they’d work on in the future, so if having something like this seems useful to you, please click through and give the post a +1.
A screen capture of what my posting “velocity” looks like on the back end of my website. The darkest squares indicate 30+ posts in a day while the next darkest indicate between 15-30 posts. My “streak” is far longer than this chart indicates. I obviously post a LOT.
Circular Widthmaps
Today I saw a note that led me to the Internet Archive which I know has recently had a redesign. I’m not sure if the functionality I saw was part of this redesign, but it’s pretty awesome. I’m not sure quite what to call this sort of circular bar chart given what it does, but circular widthmap seems vaguely appropriate. Here’s a link to the archive.org page for my website that shows this cool UI, screencaptures of which also appear below: http://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/https://www.boffosocko.com/
Instead of using color gradations to indicate a relative number of posts, the UI is measuring things via width in ever increasing concentric circles. The innermost circle indicates the root domain and successive levels out add additional paths from my site. Because I’m using dated archive paths, there’s a level of circle by year (2019, 2018, 2017, etc.) then another level outside that by months (April 2019, March 2019, etc.), and finally the outermost circle which indicates individual posts. As a result, the width of a particular year or month indicates relatively how active that time frame was on my website (or at least how active Archive.org thinks it was based on its robot crawler.)
Of course the segments on the circles also measure things like categories and tags on my site as well along with the date based archives. Thus I can gauge how often I use particular categories for example.
I’ll also note that in the 2018 portion of the circle for July 11th, I had a post that slashdotted my website when it took off on Hacker News. That individual day is represented as really wide on that circular ring because it has an additional concentric circle outside of it that represents the hundreds of comment URL fragments for that post. So one must keep in mind that things in some of the internal rings aren’t as relative because they may be heavily affected by portions of content further out on the ring.
My website posting activity (and a little more) from 2018 and before according to the Internet Archive.
My website posting activity (and a little more) from April 2019 and before according to the Internet Archive.
How awesome would it be if this were embed-able and usable on my own website?
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