Dashboard improvements
Hello, Dan Wilson here. I’m doing most of the user interface stuff for Timetric.
This morning I pushed a big update to the dashboard page, adding some new functionality, and making it quite a bit prettier.
Overview
The dashboard is the registered user’s entry point to the site, and gives a brief summary of all the nuggets they’ve expressed an interest in.
The summary includes a sparkline for each nugget, which provides a succinct visual summary of the history of the series. We’ve rewritten the sparkline generator from scratch for this update, and as a result is considerably faster, and gives more attractive results.
Analysis
Since the dashboard is the natural place to view collections of nuggets, we’ve added some basic analysis tools. Pairs of nuggets can be selected using the tick boxes down the left-hand edge, and overlaid upon each other, or turned into a “versus”-graph using the buttons at the bottom.
You can also create a new calculated nugget from your selections by clicking the button under “Build a Nugget”.
You can then edit the formula using an Excel-like syntax, and then click “Create”.
Feed Me
Finally, we’ve added a combined news feed for all the nuggets on your dashboard, which you can subscribe to in any news-reader which supports password-protected feeds.
As usual, we’d love to hear your feedback.
Finding things
Hi there! I’m Andrew Walkingshaw, and – amongst other things – I’m responsible for helping you to find the data you’re looking for on Timetric.
That means two things, really; I build ways for you to find the data already in Timetric, and I find and upload new sources of data which we think you might be interested in. I’m going to write about the first of these today, but if there’s data out there which you’d like us to get, leave us a suggestion on our Get Satisfaction site and we’ll see what we can do.
Anyway, about finding data. If you’ve used sites like Flickr or Delicious, then Timetric’s going to feel pretty familiar – like them, we use search and tagging to help you get to the data you’re after.
When you log into Timetric, the first thing you see is your dashboard.
Dashboard
Any nuggets you’re watching appear in here. Up in the top right hand corner, though, there’s a search box; if you type something in there and hit “Search”, then you get back a page of search results.
Search results
I searched for “bond” here, and I’ve got back a page of information about bond prices. Let’s say I’m not interested in data from Moody’s: if I search for “bond -Moody”, then I can exclude them from the search results.
Search results for "bond -Moody"
Under each of these search results, you can see a list of tags (in light grey). When you upload data, you can give a list of tags to remember it by – categories, more or less. A lot of the data here comes from the UK National Statistics dataset from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/, and we’ve tagged that “National Statistics” – so if you click on that tag:
… then you get back a list of everything tagged with that tag – for this dataset, about 2000 pages worth! So you’ll need to be able to filter that. From this page, you can filter by another tag – the most common tags found alongside the ones you’re filtering by are listed at the top of the page. Let’s filter by “monthly”:
Multi-tag filters
We’re based in Cambridge, about an hour away from London, so I’m most interested in what’s going on in the south of England. I can search within these results by typing “south” into the search box there.
Tagging and searching together
So you can use tags and searching together to find the data you’re interested in. If there’s something you’re looking for which you can’t find, though, let us know and we’ll try and help you out.
About Timetric
Hello, and welcome to the Timetric blog!
Timetric’s a service for tracking numbers which matter to you; numbers you record, numbers published by your friends and colleagues, and numbers from public data. We’re still testing, so we’re not open to the general public yet, but if you sign up on our website we’ll try and invite as many of you in as soon as we can, and we’ll keep you up to date on what we’re doing here. Have a look at our Get Satisfaction site too – we’d really appreciate any feedback you can give us.
Timetric’s developed by Inkling Software. We’re based in Cambridge in the UK.