Widgenie « Pineapple Pinnacles

Widgenie

Monday, August 11, 2008 by Samuel Koh

Pineapple Pinnacles was approached by Christy from Widgenie to do a review of their new system.

This was some time back when I encountered a glitch (unnecessary alphabetization of data) while testing it out and they rectified it recently =))

Widgenie is still in beta mode.

So after much deliberation, I decided to use data of visitors from all over the world categorized into respective countries instead of solely using monthly visitors stream, as then I would have more data to play with.

Many thanks to SiteMeter for providing the statistics.

Here’s first look at SiteMeter’s data. Data used is from 22 July till today.

Roughly half a month’s worth of data. (Yeah, it’s cos I just signed up on Sitemeter and it’s lovely)

Everything’s pretty straight forward here on SiteMeter. =))

We then use the statistics and replicate the results on Widgenie.

I had to type in the results via Microsoft Excel or via a CSV file..I chose to use Excel to do my results and the file can be obtained here. After entering your required data, you would have to upload it onto Widgenie.

If you noticed, CHINA being the largest population and all (≈ 1.3 billion people), I don’t even get a single hit from them, they also lose out to Vietnam (≈ 85 million people).

I figured I should compare China with another communist country.

I’ll get to explaining that later.

The Excel file apparently is functioning as it should be as shown below (in decimal, although I would have preferred they stuck to what I wrote in the Excel file i.e. in percentages like 50%).

If you noticed, there’s a difference in results like for the US in the Sitemeter captured picture, it states 50%, then in the following picture, it’s 50%. Pardon me, but due to my slow capturing…visitors came and went and thus the results got altered a little.

Going over to creating widgets – we find that there are six widget types; namely Tabular, Animated Line Chart, Animated Bar Chart, Animated Area Chart, Animated Pie Chart, and Text Cloud Widget.

Their widgets are not WordPress-friendly – which sucks.

So I have to use links for you to see them as they should be seen.

Click on the images to bring you to their normal state.

A look at Tabular layout:

I don’t get why there is a useless “0″ at the end of every data, except that United States has a “1″ at its end – which puzzles me even more. Not to mention, it’s an eyesore too.

This happens for every following widget I made. Sigh.

Animated Line Layout:

Say “Hi” to Mr. “0″ there behind Germany.

Animated Bar Chart:

Singapore yells “0″!

Animated Area Chart:

Ok I gotta stop poking at the app. =D

Animated Pie Chart:

Lastly, the Text Cloud Widget:

Except that it would be with links on them, I just didn’t put any into my Excel file.

It’s nice they came in different colors, but would have helped if they also appeared bigger/smaller relative to their size.

Overall: If the site’s system weren’t so slow to make changes, I would have made more change to the layout of the widgets.

But when it takes somewhere around 30 seconds to change one colour and to reload the widget – not many people would want to deal with changing of colors.

And if it weren’t glitchy, I would have totally avoided encountering this error no less than 4 times.

If Widgenie…

Incorporated WordPress-friendly widgets,
Less or not glitchy at all,
Faster in terms of amending details,
Option to just input data on the site itself and not needing upload input via MS Excel or using CSV,
Would help if it did not automatically refresh with every single change – takes up sooo much time!
And it would be awesome if there was an option to disable showing of the Widget Name, Created Date, Created By (which unfortunately shows the email instead of the maker’s name), and Description, when clicked on the links which directs to Widgenie. That is, just show the interactive Widget, no more, no less.
And what’s with the redundant “1″s and “0″s appearing?