cbfishes
nxstmp
Experimenting with Metabase, an open-source and self-hostable (!) analytics platform. Basically, it can grab data directly from databases and present it to you in helpful, easy-to-understand, and beautiful ways. Installation took about 5 minutes; I just had to download a java file and run it. Easy-peasy.
Today I hooked it up to my journal, which is really just a MySQL database with a PHP front-end. Excited to be able to make some sense of all this data that I’m collecting on myself.
I’ve tried to build my own dashboards to display data from my journal, but none of them were this easy and pretty.
My journal aggregates all of my digital life (and some of my analog life via scanning) into one place. Here’s a chart that breaks my entries down by source– everything from Twitter and Facebook posts, to pictures I take on my phone, to git commits, to checkins, and so and and so forth.
Here’s the number of entries by weekday. I’m not on my computer or phone on the weekends as much as I am during the week.
…and entries by hour of day:
You can pretty much tell when I sleep. Some entries are automatic (like archiving my todo.txt file or my today file every night around midnight) but most are the result of things I actively do (post to Facebook, take a picture, bookmark a site, etc.).
Hooray data!
Especially cool is the map display, which shows a pin for recent entries with geolocation information. You can really tell where I spend my time in the Summer (spoiler alert: in the woods in Lowell).
An often repeated mantra in programming and other fields is don’t reinvent the wheel. Metabase seems like a great way to visualize my own data while still keeping it safe and secure… and I didn’t have to write my own analytics suite. I sure do love open source software.
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(original: chrisbeckstrom.com/2018/08/21/metabase-is-a-cool-way-to-v...)
nxstmp
Experimenting with Metabase, an open-source and self-hostable (!) analytics platform. Basically, it can grab data directly from databases and present it to you in helpful, easy-to-understand, and beautiful ways. Installation took about 5 minutes; I just had to download a java file and run it. Easy-peasy.
Today I hooked it up to my journal, which is really just a MySQL database with a PHP front-end. Excited to be able to make some sense of all this data that I’m collecting on myself.
I’ve tried to build my own dashboards to display data from my journal, but none of them were this easy and pretty.
My journal aggregates all of my digital life (and some of my analog life via scanning) into one place. Here’s a chart that breaks my entries down by source– everything from Twitter and Facebook posts, to pictures I take on my phone, to git commits, to checkins, and so and and so forth.
Here’s the number of entries by weekday. I’m not on my computer or phone on the weekends as much as I am during the week.
…and entries by hour of day:
You can pretty much tell when I sleep. Some entries are automatic (like archiving my todo.txt file or my today file every night around midnight) but most are the result of things I actively do (post to Facebook, take a picture, bookmark a site, etc.).
Hooray data!
Especially cool is the map display, which shows a pin for recent entries with geolocation information. You can really tell where I spend my time in the Summer (spoiler alert: in the woods in Lowell).
An often repeated mantra in programming and other fields is don’t reinvent the wheel. Metabase seems like a great way to visualize my own data while still keeping it safe and secure… and I didn’t have to write my own analytics suite. I sure do love open source software.
---
(original: chrisbeckstrom.com/2018/08/21/metabase-is-a-cool-way-to-v...)