Project:LHS Graphs and Visualizations

LHS Graphs and Visualizations
Members	Elliot
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Overview

I'd am supplementing the Cacti graphs that we have for LHS bandwidth and power with metrics that provide insight to the growth of our community and organisation over time.

Phase 1 is complete and we now chart the following:

• Number of members
• Wiki activity

Later I'd like to investigate:

• Website visitors and/or page impressions
• Mailing list activity
• Space occupancy

In progress

Space occupancy

I have located two Laser Diode Retroreflective Sensors in our stores which I intend to use to monitor space occupancy by having the beams cross the main doorway. The beams will be staggered so that direction (arriving, leaving) can be determined by the order in which the beams are broken. I was thinking of mounting them at waist height.

These sensors appear to be in working order. They'd should be safe to use below child-head height. They were manufactured in 1996 and use a Class II laser rated at 3mW with a wavelength of 655-670nm (datasheet).

The model number is: Q45BB6LL

Desired

Website visitors and/or page impressions

The main site and the Wiki use Google Analytics and this has an API. This documented method looks promising:

 https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/data?metrics=ga%3Avisits%2Cga%3Apageviews&start-date=2010-11-29&end-date=2010-12-13&max-results=50

Mailing list activity

• Calculate the size of the list (members) from the mailing list download
  • It would be easier to scrape this from the box on the right hand side: http://groups.google.com/group/london-hack-space
• Scrape the number of posts from the front page: http://groups.google.com/group/london-hack-space

Excellent idea: I'll try this. --Teabot 12:22, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

• Candidate regex for this:

  <a [^>]+ href="/group/london-hack-space/topics"><b>Discussions</b></a><img [^>]+><span [^>]+>[0-9]+ of ([0-9]+) messages</span>
  <a [^>]+ href="/group/london-hack-space/members"><b>Members</b></a><img [^>]+><span [^>]+>([0-9]+) members</span>

Done

To chart the initial metrics various bits of data are exposed in a Cacti friendly way.

Number of members

COMPLETE - but may have to wait 12 months before it becomes interesting.

This data is stored in an Sqlite database on Turing. See the Schema. It can be queried like so:

 SELECT COUNT(id)
 FROM users
 WHERE subscribed = true;

Cacti runs on babbage but the members database is on Turing. There is a PHP script on Turing to expose the member numbers and then a script on babbage to pull this in with a HTTP request.

This PHP generates the following output for cacti: subscribed:136 pending:2

 <?php
 
 require_once( $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/../lib/init.php'); 
 $subscribers = $db->translatedQuery( 'SELECT COUNT(id) AS num FROM users WHERE subscribed=1' )->fetchRow();
 $pending = $db->translatedQuery( 'SELECT COUNT(id) AS num FROM users WHERE subscribed=0' )->fetchRow();
 
 print "subscribed:{$subscribers['num']} pending:{$pending['num']}";

Perl to fetch member numbers for cacti:

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 
 use strict;
 use LWP::Simple;
 
 eval {
   my $file = get("http://london.hackspace.org.uk/member_stats.php");
   print $file;
   1;
 } or do {
   print "NaN";
 }

Wiki statistics

COMPLETE

• We get this using the MediaWiki API:

 http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics&format=xml

It returns:

 <?xml version="1.0"?>
 <api>
   <query>
     <statistics
       pages="759"
       articles="215"
       views="229656"
       edits="7368"
       images="186"
       users="166"
       activeusers="22"
       admins="61"
       jobs="13"
     />
   </query>
 </api>

Perl to generate the following output for cacti: pages:759 articles:215 views:229656 edits:7368 images:186 users:166 activeusers:22 admins:61 jobs:13

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 
 use strict;
 use LWP::Simple;
 use XML::Simple;
 
 eval {
   my $file = get("http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics&format=xml");
   my $xs1 = XML::Simple->new();
   my $doc = $xs1->XMLin($file);
   my $first = 1;
 
   foreach my $key (keys (%{$doc->{query}->{statistics}})){
     if ($first eq 1) {
       $first = 0;
     } else {
       print " ";
     }
     print $key . ":" . $doc->{query}->{statistics}->{$key};
   }
   1;
 } or do {
   print "NaN";
 }

Mailing list activity

COMPLETE

• There is no API for Google Groups. We poll the RSS feed and count new messages.

 https://groups.google.com/group/london-hack-space/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml?num=50

This script yields: messages:0

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 
 use Date::Manip;
 use LWP::Simple;
 use XML::Simple;
 use Data::Dumper;
 
 eval {
   my $ua = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/540.0 (KHTML,like Gecko) Chrome/9.1.0.0 Safari/540.0";
   my $client = LWP::UserAgent->new;
   $client->agent($ua);
 
   my $response = $client->get("http://groups.google.com/group/london-hack-space/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml?num=50");
   my $xml = $response->content;
   my $xs1 = new XML::Simple(keeproot => 1,searchpath => ".", forcearray => 1, keyattr => [key, tag]);
   my $doc = $xs1->XMLin($xml, KeepRoot => 1);
 
   if ($response->is_success) {
     $xml = $response->content;
   } else {
     print "Nan";
     exit (1);
   }
 
   my $lastTime = 0;
   open (MYFILE, 'lhs_rss_feed_ts.dat');
   while (<MYFILE>) {
     chomp;
     $lastTime = $_;
  }
  close (MYFILE);  
 
   my $nextTime = $lastTime;
   my $messageCount = 0; 
   foreach my $item (@{$doc->{rss}->[0]->{channel}->[0]->{item}}){
     my $currDate = \$item->{pubDate}->[0];
     my $unixDate = UnixDate($$currDate,"%s");
     if ($unixDate gt $lastTime) {
       $messageCount++;
       if ($unixDate gt $nextTime) {
         $nextTime = $unixDate;
       }
     }
   }
 
   open (MYFILE, '>lhs_rss_feed_ts.dat');
   print MYFILE $nextTime;
   close (MYFILE);
 
   print "messages:" . $messageCount;
   1;
 } or do {
   print "NaN";
 }