General Feedback
Hello, If you have any feedback on mycrocosm, feel free to post something in the comments of this page (or on any of the posts). Thanks
Dev Blog
Hello, If you have any feedback on mycrocosm, feel free to post something in the comments of this page (or on any of the posts). Thanks
Hi, great stuff!
One urgent feature request: a personal setting for prefered timezone. Tracking time with ‘now’ is otherwise pretty useless. (only for those in EST)
Oh, and Twitter integration would be nice too
draadloos
September 7, 2008 at 8:10 am
Hi Draadloos, user specified timezones are available now and should hopefull make things easier. And also definitely thinking about twitter integration.
Yannick
September 9, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Using it already, what a quick response!
draadloos
September 10, 2008 at 4:44 am
I’d love to see the “shared” graph color scheme change to allow for even more labels… it seems to top out on readability around 7/8 and individual labels start to resemble eachother.
Alternatively, since this could easily get out of hand. Maybe a “overlay/compare” feature that lets you present multiple graphs of similar structure (from different friends) on top of eachother.
Examples where this is starting to be an issue:
http://mycro.media.mit.edu/dataset/show/1689
and
http://mycro.media.mit.edu/dataset/show/1171
clickykbd
September 14, 2008 at 2:18 am
Another feature request: Other Service Gateways…
Perhaps extend into existing audiences on Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, etc etc (who all have public APIs) and let mycro users add mycrocosm datum via a prefix to their txt via their favorite service. mycro: or @mycro etc etc.
Alternative is to have an account on each of these services and let people message to it directly as a gateway. Perhaps better as non-mycro users might complain of the noise in their contacts txt streams if you tried passive filtering to collect datum.
Would certainly broaden the mechanisms by which to get the data into a dataset.
Just putting it out there.
clickykbd
September 14, 2008 at 2:26 am
Can’t resist one more…
Mobile friendly pages? (perhaps they exist and I just don’t see them due to client detection). But your own graphs of ping-pong games made me think mycro is (among many possibilities) kinda a cool universal (and perpetual) scorecard system… could probably be adapted to all sorts of games people play… If you could easily update AND VIEW on the phone it would better serve this little niche that actually USES the graphical version almost immediately.
clickykbd
September 14, 2008 at 2:32 am
I understand the purpose of having a webpage frontend, but it would unique to have a command line tool that would post to your own page. for the times when you might have peering eyes or so. also perhaps a delete command. e.g -work instead of going to the actual graph to delete.
jope
September 14, 2008 at 10:03 pm
@clickykbd – Thanks for all the comments, feel free to keep ‘em coming. I will definitely look at the colour palette for the shared datasets (hopefully soon). It is not as ‘tweaked’ as the regular palette and its been on my todo list for a while. I have been thinking of twitter integration for a while, so far i prefer the method of direct messages to some “mycrocosm” user on twitter that i could take the messages from. I haven’t looked much at the twitter api much, but i could see adding this in the future. As for mobile friendly pages, it would be nice but is probably far far off in the future. Btw currently there are no explicitly mobile friendly page – though i have seen the front page on a mobile phone and it looked pretty decent (the user list was unwieldy and unfortunately had to be scrolled all the way through to see the graphs). There are also some technical issues with being mobile friendly, we are transitioning more and more of the graphs to flash and a lot of mobile devices cannot display flash content. So without a really strong demand or need to see the graphs while on the go doing a mobile version is probably not on the cards for a while. But thanks a lot for your thoughts.
@jope – an immediate solution would be to use email to input data (which can be done from the command line). I am also working on something that should allow you to use command line tools like curl or to write you own input mechanisms (basically a small api).
@clickykbd – Wrt to graph overlays, i am also thinking about something that may solve that problem in a different way. Grouping datasets by tags to allow you to see a collection of graphs from different people. It should allow some comparison between similar graphs (and also has a few advantages for other issues on the site).
Cheers
Yannick
September 16, 2008 at 4:39 pm
One peeve (if you are willing to hear them out)…
The data-set page “change name” field so closely resembles the submit data field (size etc) that I often end up typing data into it. Whoops. Maybe we should be able to send data from any page, not just our home page. Some kind of universal mycrocosm header would be nice.
Request:
Also a default day/date offset would be nice for some graphs. I have one going that is a total of events during a day, but most people wait till the end of the day (or next) to tabulate and submit to it. The date being “today” is actually the wrong day for this graph (consistently 1-day ahead), and everyone has to edit their records to correct.
Fun stuff. I’ve shared it to numerous contacts.
ciao
clickykbd
September 18, 2008 at 1:37 am
I’m enjoying experimenting with this a little here and there but there are a few issues I’ve encountered.
In an attempt to discover how many emails an individual and I send back and forth to each other each day I have started a graph to calculate this. The thing is that I’d rather have a daily average than a total tally. That way I could see that on average Thursday has more emails sent than Tuesday. Currently it would just show it as Thursday’s total number of emails and Tuesday’s total number. Any way we could have an average option?
Also, in the same graph, I have it in a bar graph organized by date only there is no order to it. The dates are shown in any random order, making it difficult to track effectively. Any idea why it would do that?
That’s all I have for now. If I come up with anything brilliant later I’ll be sure to mention it.
dpiechnik
September 19, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Thanks everyone for all the suggestions, not quite sure when it will happen but i will try and implement some of these.
@dpiechnik I took a look at the ordering problem on some bar graphs and think that i have fixed it. It should be working as expected now.
Yannick
September 20, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Yup. Works great now. Thanks. Way easier to look at.
dpiechnik
September 22, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Had a thought today that although the “shared” graphs are fun… the process of sharing it with people is a bit cumbersome.
Might be fun to have a truly “public” data-set that any site member can append data to. As long as it’s on topics sometimes you don’t care who submits.
clickykbd
September 24, 2008 at 1:28 am
This regards tracking time. When I start, should the graph wait to update until I send the stop command? It seems to be working that way. Also, modifications to the dataset entries don’t recognize valid start times until a valid stop time has been entered.
General Feedback: I love the concept and the personal challenge it provides. This is fun.
DFWTEXN
October 22, 2008 at 9:30 am
Also, It seems like dataset entries for time tracking are sorting by duration. Maybe it makes more sense to sort them by date and start time. Just a suggestion.
Thanks
DFWTEXN
October 22, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I am finding the cell phone interface processes a . stop as a .start. Has anyone else noticed this behavior?
dfwtexn
October 24, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Hi, Just wanted to let you know that i will look into those time tracking issues as soon as i get a chance. Thanks for commenting.
Yannick
October 25, 2008 at 1:14 pm
This is neat.
Is there an API for retrieving data? Say something restful? I thought I saw mention of one, but now I can’t find any reference.
Is this open source? If so I’d love to add an api. My ultimate goal is to create a more friendly user interface than command line for the website. Commands are the way to go over twitter and sms. The website might benefit from having buttons for each dataset. I made some sketches and was going to code up a greasemonkey script to start playing with it, but then I realized it would be ridiculous without a GET api.
pees,diN0.
diN0bot
November 15, 2008 at 11:58 pm
hi,
I wonder if there is a way to get the tracked data as csv or something similar? I want to track data and then make custom viszualisations.
norrix
December 4, 2008 at 11:34 am
Yannick – You should place a link to general feedback (http://mycrocosm.wordpress.com/general-feedback/) in the mycrocosm header. That way you’d get more folks clicking through and feeding back (feedbacking?? How the heck does one inverberize “feedback”).
Bruce P. Henry
December 11, 2008 at 2:10 pm
@Bruce, i think if i change the link in the navigation called “Blog” to “Feedback” may do the trick. thanks for the suggestion.
@diNO there isn’t quite an API yet, but one question for you and any other developers out there, what would you want in an API for mycrocosm (no promises though
@norrix i could get you your data as JSON, but this is a manual process at the moment.
Yannick
December 11, 2008 at 2:39 pm
A WAP site for input would be awesome.
Arasmus
December 17, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Oh my god. I am so excited that I found this website. I have been asking friends and searching for the application that would allow me to track personal data for a while and I’m so so pleased I found you.
Looking forward to putting it to good use.
Aviv
Aviv
January 14, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I am not succeeding in entering data using email. I’ve tried several times, using different configurations but nothing seems to be getting through. Any idea what could be going wrong?
Aviv
January 16, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Hey Aviv,
Thanks for letting me know. It turns out that someone had sent an email with an image attached that was completely gumming up the works, and i hadn’t noticed that this wasn’t working for almost a month now. Its gone now and email updates should be working now. Once again thanks for posting.
To everyone else. there was quite a bit of backed up email so you may see some updates appear that you had thought had disappeared. Sorry
.
Yannick
Yannick
January 16, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Hi there,
I was trying to log some temperature data in °C – and couldn’t get mycrocosm to display a negative value properly. Is there any chance of doing this?
Otherwise: Nice tool.
jenaschinder
February 18, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Hi Jenaschinder,
Thanks for the compliment, sorry for the long delay in responding. Would you mind providing an example of what you are trying to enter (or how you are trying to display it). I tried to make a chart with some negative numbers and it worked for me, so let me know what sequence of inputs/actions aren’t working for you and i’ll look into it.
Thanks
Yannick
Yannick
March 3, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Hi Yannick,
an example is the “temperature”-graph in my profile (same nick, obviously). I tried using “-” instead of “+” and also tried editing data afterwards – none worked for me
“0″ is also not posible BTW.
Regards
Jan
jenaschinder
March 4, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Hi Jan,
So i have enabled support for negative numbers, it may still have a few bugs so let me know how it works or you. A few notes, negative numbers will only be visualized in line charts; the syntax for adding negative valued data is, “[dataset] [category] + -n” or “[dataset] -n” (where -10 can be any negative number). So in your case could be something like Temperature garage + -20. This may look strange but the way mycrocosm was designed the number after the word was just supposed to represent the number of times the previous word occurred (and thus would only be positive). So the fact that you could change it to a negative number in the edit data page was more of an oversight. But rather than modify how the entry string is parsed, i just removed the restriction and we shall see how it works out.
Thanks for bringing it up though and i hope the solution works for you.
Also if anyone else notices any weirdness with their line graphs let me know, i tried as much as possible to keep existing graphs (with all positive values) looking exactly the same.
Cheers
Yannick
Yannick
March 9, 2009 at 4:15 pm
@jenaschinder another note wrt to data entry with negative numbers. The default value for missing data is still zero, so for example in graphs organized by date with multiple series (such as your temperature graph) if any data has a value for just one of the series the other series’ data will default to zero for that date. This is the same as how it works for positive numbers.
Yannick
March 9, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Good job. Thanks a lot
jenaschinder
March 9, 2009 at 4:30 pm
… coming back to my “temperature” stats: somehow the category that doesn’t involve a hegative value has a constant value instead of the various numbers that I entered. Any idea what’s happening?
jenaschinder
March 17, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Just once more: The constant value seems to eb the maximum value – hope that it might help…
jenaschinder
March 21, 2009 at 7:16 am
One day about three months ago my line graphs all went berserk–showing straight lines where there should have been varied data, showing values completely out of proportion to actual, entered values.
On one graph I have noticed that if I make sure the data is entered in the exact same order every day (see http://mycro.media.mit.edu/dataset/show/4139), the lines will at least approximate the right shape over time; the values are still inadequate though: in the above graph, my sleep avg should be just over 9 as of today, and so both the “sleep” line and the “sleep avg” line are elevated beyond what they should show.
Is maintenance still being done on this site? I don’t know exactly when this started, but I notice also that “recent updates” on the front page appears to be stuck at June 28. Maybe you all went home for the summer..?
Any help appreciated.
Erik
July 20, 2009 at 4:41 am
Hey Erik,
In March I did make some changes to the line graphs to support negative numbers (see the comments just above yours) – so it may have broken then. I am assuming the graph at http://mycro.media.mit.edu/dataset/show/2626 is not supposed to have those spikes?
As far as site maintenance i have to say that mycrocosm is not actively maintained at the moment (I’ve been meaning to make a post about that) but basically for quite a while i have been working on a different project (my thesis project) and don’t have much time to work on mycrocosm, but it should be up and running for the foreseeable future, though without much changes or maintenance. I should be able to fix that regression though once i get some time but that may not be for a while (another month or so – it is possible that i will get some time before then to fix it but i happen to be smack in the middle of trying to write a thesis on a completely unrelated project). How urgent is this for you? Given that its been a few months already could you wait a while for a fix, or is it quite urgent? Let me know and i’ll take it into account in scheduling a fix.
About the frontpage thanks, i know about that bug, its an issue with the cache not expiring as it should – i may be able to come up with a quick workaround though (at the moment i have to expire it manually).
Thanks
Yannick
July 20, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Thanks for the quick reply. Yeah, that graph is not supposed to have huge spikes like that. Others have just decided to permanently spike–giving me a straight line all the way across the top–and other oddities.
It’s not really urgent, especially relative to your thesis; do that first! I mean, unless you need an excuse for a break–but I know that it can be too easy to find excuses to stop, so don’t stop if you don’t seriously need to rest, and even then, stop only until you are rejuvenated.
None of my graphs are mission-critical, so I can survive without perfect ones until you are done writing. The one I use mainly is the one that records my sleep time, and that is working fine.
Best of luck!
Erik
July 21, 2009 at 3:25 am