Questions about the statistics system

[anarres]

Hi all! I'm getting ready to start my GSoC project on Usage and Business Statistics, and I'm just starting to realize how much stuff I don't know! I hope this is the right place to post some questions about the statistics system:

1. How can I use the stats system modules in a perl script? I would like to write a simple script like this as a way of learning about how the stats system works:

--------------

use DW::StatStore;
use DW::StatData;
use DW::StatData::AccountsByType;

my $accounts_by_type = DW::StatData::AccountsByType->load_latest( DW::StatStore->get( "accounts" ) );

# MORE CODE...

--------------

but if I do this within my Dreamhack perl complains that it can't find the modules I asked it to use (even though exactly the same code works fine within /stats/site.bml!) I've tried adding an absolute path to the modules, but it turns out that these depend on a bunch of LJ modules which I can't find.

2. How can I get my Dreamhack to display /admin/stats.bml? (This is only displayed to users with admin priviledges).

3. What are 'crumbs'? I've seen this word in a couple of places, and I've no idea what it is.

4. Just to check, is it the case that if I'm editing a BML page, I should convert it to Template Toolkit?

5. /stats.bml uses the old legacy stats system - is it going to be replaced, or left as it is? If it's going to stay, should I add graphs to it (i.e. display the info on this page in graph form - apart from Age Distribution, which already has a graph)?.

Comments

Re: Correction re #1

[pauamma]

HOME /dreamhack/home/8214-anarres LJHOME /dreamhack/home/8214-anarres/dw

which I think is probably right?

Yeah, they look good.

But I've just noticed that my /stats/site.bml just shows a blank page - but it was working before, after you showed me how to turn on stats collection. (I've checked that etc/stats-collectin.conf and bin/worker/stats-collection have the lines suggested in http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Stats_Design). So I'm worried that somewhere along the way I must have done something to make it stop working :-P

How long ago did you last run the stats-collection worker? Typically, the stats page will be empty (just the header and footer, no actual stats) if you didn't run the worker within the last 24 hours. If the stats page is *completely* blank (no header or footer either), or if you did run the stats worker in the last 24 hours, you probably have another problem, like a syntax error somewhere, in which case looking at the error log for your Apache should provide more info.

I need to bring my dreamhack up to date anyway, and if I caused the problem by fiddling with something somewhere, maybe updating my dreamhack would solve that?

I don't think that's the cause of your problem (see above), but that's a good thing to do anyway.

Re: Correction re #1

[anarres]

This is really odd - it was completely blank before (not even header and footer displaying) and now it looks the same as dreamwidth.org/stats/site - i.e. it gives the message "(Sorry those statistics aren't available right now)" for the three different types of stats, but I guess that's what it's meant to do at the moment. I did update my dreamhack so maybe that's what did it. One less thing to try to fix, I supose.

Re: Correction re #1

[pauamma]

Interesting. The message (repeated for all stat groups) is what you get if you didn't run the collection worker recently enough. (I was wrong earlier about he effect of that - brainfart)