As I mentioned briefly in a thread last week, I knocked up a script in a few spare minutes to gather popular page statistics, primarily to feed my inner geek's desire for all things numeric.
I've now created an extremely ugly and basic front-end for the collected data that allows you to see the photos that have made it onto the PP for any given user, as well as some statistics tracking how long the photos were on the PP, and how high they reached.
Note that I've only been collecting the data for about a month -- there's no way as an external user to collect historic data, so unfortunately this does not have data prior to the end of April.
If people find it interesting or useful, I may prettify it a little, and add more functionality.
Let me know if you find any bugs or have any questions! I'd also be interested if people find it useful, or if it's just too geeky even by my standards ;)
@abirkill Wow nicely done Alexis, this is very interesting and useful, a lot of people are interested in knowing if their photos made it onto to pp page. I rarely check pp anymore so this makes things a lot easier lol.
@sewsharyn Absolutely, although it's 'scraping' the 365 site for the data, so a change in the way the site is laid out would break the data collection, at least temporarily.
@breigh Have you had any photos in PP this month? Unfortunately I don't have data going back further than the 25th April, so it can only show photos that made it into PP subsequent to that. Edit: Your second reply crossed my answer :)
How does it work.... I looked up mine and they entered low in the charts and then up to 2nd or 3rd and then dropped out again.... I then checked out @michaelelliott and his super popular shot recently is buried in the 40s spot....
Is the numbers reflective of how many faves per moment of time?
@bobfoto That's a question for the magic monkeys -- unfortunately I don't have any insight into the workings of PP other than what can be discerned as a user of the site.
I suspect that the ranking is based on the number of favs (and comments?) your photo received in a given time compared to other photos in PP, so if people start to fav and comment your shot more than higher-ranked shots, you go up (and vice-versa). This means if you have a sudden sharp burst of favs, you will enter the rankings quite high, and then drop out relatively quickly once the flurry stops, whereas if you gather favs slowly over a long period, you might never reach a very high rank, but you will stay in the list for a long time.
(Equally, we also know that there is a bias to allow users with a small number of followers to have a chance of getting in with a smaller number of favs than a user with a large number of followers, so all this must be calculated as well)
It's also fairly evident that there is something that 'kicks' photos out of PP after a certain amount of time, regardless of their ranking. This makes sense when you think about it, as it stops a small set of awesome photos dominating PP for days or even weeks at a time.
@summerfield No problem! That's one of the main reasons I made it -- a number of photos enter PP for as little as 10 minutes, and you may never know a photo made it unless you check the page non-stop!
@abirkill - very interesting, and while your link here has made for some interesting discoveries, I think it will only add to that old debate of just who the magic monkeys are....
@bobfoto Absolutely. I would be rather disappointed if I was able to deduce all or even most of the mysteries of the process, it's far more interesting not to know :)
@bobfoto Unfortunately not without Ross giving me access to the 365project database, which I think is highly unlikely, and probably not a responsibility I'd want anyway. (Even that assumes that it logs historic PP data, which is by no means certain).
@bobfoto He's very welcome to it (as is anyone else who thinks they could do something useful with it), although I'd probably have to tidy it up before I dared let anyone see it -- it's the software equivalent of a doodle in the corner of a used napkin ;)
That's amazing - thank you so much for your hard work, one of mine was only on briefly and if it wasn't for a friend I wouldn't have known. Thank you !!
@abirkill thanks, what a great idea! My first ever photo on the PP I missed - only for people commenting did I know it was ever there so this link is very useful :)
This is very cool. Thank-you for doing this. I have not been on the PP during this time and I am pretty sure I have never been and probably won't ever be but I do appreciate you doing this. At least maybe once in a while I can check it and see if something did make it to the PP for a few hours.
Great work. I just hope that it does not interfere with the workings of the site. There was a process that was written a while back that would list your followers that hadn't posted in over 30 days, so as to aid in cleaning up who you follow and vice versa. I'm not sure of the actual reason, but I remember that it was turned off due to interference it had on this site. Ross might comment on that.
@bobfoto@abirkill - While my photos have been a virtual fixture in Weekly Top 20 - over 80 times - I rarely make the PP. T20 based purely on favs while PP is based upon exceeding your own algorithm, which given my very high avg, makes it extremely hard for me to surpass to trigger PP. The monkey thing is not real. It's math and Ross says I'm a victim of my own success.
Great tool Alexis and something I will use; I've bookmarked it!
P.S. I like to keep track because at the end of the year I like to put together a slideshow of people's favorites so I can share back with them :) It also helps me track what seems to be marketable so I can add the popular ones to my sales website.
as busy as I've been lately, I tend to only check the pop page on weekends when I have time to click on photos I want to see larger and comment and fav others photos, so this is a great tool for me so I can see when I've made pp myself now. Thank you Alexis! @abirkill
@grizzlysghost Aaron basing your most popular on pop page is a mistake. Most popular would be most fav'd. Making PP is based against exceeding your avg which like mine I'm sure is very high. So some of your best or most fav'd may not necessarily have been on PP.
@byrdlip I saw that as well, and I'm also not sure of the exact reason behind it being disabled.
This was designed with minimising the load on the 365project site as a high priority. The data gathering script, in simplistic terms, puts a load on the site per day similar to that of a single user viewing 2-3 photos per day. When users view the data, the thumbnail images are also served from the 365project servers, but again, these were chosen as they are the smallest image sizes and hence use very little resource.
Generating the graphs is relatively resource-intensive compared to the other actions, but all that takes place on my own server and does not use on of this site's resources.
Obviously, should Ross have any concerns over the load this is putting on the servers, I would disable it immediately, but I'm reasonably confident that this will have no measurable impact on the site's performance or hosting costs.
This is brill, well done for the effort! I wasn't aware that all of mine featured had actually reached the PP. It would be nice to have a record of the ones that were featured though. Would you (or Ross) mind if any of us used the links on e.g. our profile pages?
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
Do you mind if I put that link on my Profile?
For those wanting to have a look, leave the @ out of your username!
Edit: I've now made it so you can link directly to the page showing your photos, e.g:
http://alexisbirkill.com/365project/popularpage/getuserdetails.php?username=bulldog
@breigh Have you had any photos in PP this month? Unfortunately I don't have data going back further than the 25th April, so it can only show photos that made it into PP subsequent to that. Edit: Your second reply crossed my answer :)
Is the numbers reflective of how many faves per moment of time?
I suspect that the ranking is based on the number of favs (and comments?) your photo received in a given time compared to other photos in PP, so if people start to fav and comment your shot more than higher-ranked shots, you go up (and vice-versa). This means if you have a sudden sharp burst of favs, you will enter the rankings quite high, and then drop out relatively quickly once the flurry stops, whereas if you gather favs slowly over a long period, you might never reach a very high rank, but you will stay in the list for a long time.
(Equally, we also know that there is a bias to allow users with a small number of followers to have a chance of getting in with a smaller number of favs than a user with a large number of followers, so all this must be calculated as well)
It's also fairly evident that there is something that 'kicks' photos out of PP after a certain amount of time, regardless of their ranking. This makes sense when you think about it, as it stops a small set of awesome photos dominating PP for days or even weeks at a time.
I love the full link with the user name at the end! http://alexisbirkill.com/365project/popularpage/getuserdetails.php?username=bulldog
@abirkill
Thank you. I feel better about my project now. This is the first I've had on the PP this time round, as far as I know.
Dang!
Maybe...one day...sometime in the not too distant future...shall I be blessed!
Thanks Alexis!
P.S. I like to keep track because at the end of the year I like to put together a slideshow of people's favorites so I can share back with them :) It also helps me track what seems to be marketable so I can add the popular ones to my sales website.
@michaelelliott Interesting information about the algorithm. I did not know that.
This was designed with minimising the load on the 365project site as a high priority. The data gathering script, in simplistic terms, puts a load on the site per day similar to that of a single user viewing 2-3 photos per day. When users view the data, the thumbnail images are also served from the 365project servers, but again, these were chosen as they are the smallest image sizes and hence use very little resource.
Generating the graphs is relatively resource-intensive compared to the other actions, but all that takes place on my own server and does not use on of this site's resources.
Obviously, should Ross have any concerns over the load this is putting on the servers, I would disable it immediately, but I'm reasonably confident that this will have no measurable impact on the site's performance or hosting costs.
http://alexisbirkill.com/365project/popularpage/getuserdetails.php?username=deeganp
You are a star :)