I remember when the guys from Cuban Council released Moodstats. It was badass and quite ahead of it’s time. A shockwave app that you could use to track your mood from day to day and share that info with friends who used it as well. That was 2001-3. It was a free download but paid app, required installation, and was primarily marketing to the design geek community of that time. For that reason it wasn’t nearly as successful as it could have been.

Moodstats is an application, a personal diary or journal if you will, that allows you to record & rate how your day has been in several categories. Once you’ve entered sufficient data, Moodstats then begins to generate multi-colored graphs & statistics showing you exactly how your moods have been lately.

One of the things I found about my relationship with Moodstats, was it was an unnatural activity for me to document anything outside of work consistently, let alone how I happen to feel each and every day. I never kept a journal as a kid, so though I loved the idea, it was difficult for me to adopt it into my routine. Their site still lists them as having just 1426 users. A total shame.

I’m being sentimental, I know.

Documenting your mood, by proxy

These days we don’t need to manually enter how we feel for the purpose of tracking our mood, anyone who uses Twitter is already doing that, even if they don’t realize it.

The folks over at Summize have built Sentiment, and I just wrote about it being used by Get Satisfaction to pull in commentary from twitter related to companies, products, services, etc. They take 5 different word lists, rate them from great to wretched. Posts that don’t express sentiment are labeled as such and (I’m assuming) ignored.

We use our search engine to find up-to-the-second tweets about this topic, then automatically analyze the attitudes expressed in those tweets.

So I thought I could probably use this to see what the sentiment is for my name, @naterkane… aka my mood. Though it’s very possible for there to be skewed data for a user who receives a large number of @ messages, that isn’t the case for me. What’s my mood been like you ask? According to Summize, it’s “bad”. I can’t really argue with that, and fortunately, there’s always tomorrow to turn my mood around. :-)

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The other day I just switched from using Google’s urchin.js to their slightly shinier ga.js, which I was very happy to see produces less javascript warnings than it’s predecessor. There’s now only six warnings from the Google folks, which still isn’t anything to be excited about.

Coincidently my buddy Florian just pointed me to Clicky, a pretty cool analytics suite put together by Sean and Noah over at Roxr Software Ltd.. After taking a look at Clicky’s claims, I’m now thinging about giving Cicky a run for it’s money. And by money I mean either free, or the great price of about $2 a month for their “Premium” account. And who in this world needs and can use good analytics software and can’t afford a lousy two bucks?

Taking on the Medium Dogs

Clicky claims to crush some of the other popular non-enterprise level players: Google Analytics, SiteMeter, StatCounter, Mint and FeedBurner. I’m just wondering really how valuable some of the features are.

Don’t get me wrong, most of these features are pretty badass. But is “Clean, simple, straight forward” a feature that you can really claim you have over your competition? Um.. not really. Additionally they offer “View popular data in a TagCloud instead of boring tables and charts”, and though I don’t think that’s really much of a feature, tagclouds don’t really do it for me anyway, so whatever.

I wish I had enough traffic here that making the decision to choose one analytics software package over enough was important. So for me this is what matters most…

Filesize

Clicky comes in at approx 2k, and Google’s ga.js comes in at 8k. ‘Nuff said.

Well written javascript

Since I try my best to write all of my javascript so it passes JSLint w/o issues, I expect the same out of my libraries. On a related note I’ve started using the supercool DOMAssistant over Prototype for a number of my client projects, but that’s for another post.

As I mentioned before. Google is now only giving me 6 warnings. Three for closeurs that don’t return anything and three for referencing undefined properties. I get only one from Clicky, and it’s only because they used a ternary operator, which is something I do myself, no biggie.

Javascript-less-ness

Here’s the kicker… does it work without javascript being available to the client? Yes!

It seems to me that it’s a pretty smart idea to use the old school “load an image if javascript doesn’t work” technique. If someone decides to access your content through an interface that doesn’t support javascript, whether it be for a security policy, a mobile device, whatever, I’ll know! And be able to still get basic tracking/stat information. Good job guys.

Name Taken?

Back in 2005 Damien Katz wrote a little javascript link tracking library called Clicky, though I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the folks at Roxr Software Ltd.