[metrics-team] Demo: metrics timeline table underneath graphs

[Karsten Loesing]

On 2017-11-06 23:44, David Fifield wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 10:05:19AM +0100, Karsten Loesing wrote:
>>> On the actual Tor Metrics pages, there would not be so many entries,
>>> because we would tailor the entries to fit each graph. For example, the
>>> userstats-relay-country graph would not have entries that are specific
>>> to one pluggable transport. What I implemented for this page is
>>> basically the union of all the entries that apply to any of the three
>>> graphs, in one big table. So, for the URL I linked, the table contains
>>> all the entries where "place" is either empty (meaning global) or
>>> contains "tr", also filtered by date range.
>>>
>>> The way this works is, I wrote a program to parse the wikitext of the
>>> MetricsTimeline page and output JSON. Then I copied the JSON into a data
>>> structure in the source code of the page. So it won't update itself or
>>> anything like that. For the source code of the parser program, check out
>>> https://www.bamsoftware.com/git/tor-metrics-country.git
>>
>> That's pretty close to what I had in mind for the Tor Metrics website.
>>
>> There's one thing that we might want to do differently, and that
>> concerns the presentation as actual table vs. news entries as they
>> appear on https://metrics.torproject.org/news.html.
>>
>> Ideally, news entries would appear the same on the news page and on
>> graphs pages.
>>
>> So, one thing I'd want to try is to flatten the news entries to fit into
>> a single line. Right now, there's a line break after the
>> transport/country tags and after the description, both of which seem
>> unnecessary.
>>
>> Can you imagine reordering items in a way that they read well on a
>> single line? Maybe it means moving tags to the line end and enclosing
>> links in parentheses. Or maybe something different?
> 
> I tried putting the links in the same table cell, and I think it looks
> better.
> 
> I will probably keep the table format on my "all graphs" page because of
> its utilitarian nature.

I prepared three mockups showing possibly relevant events below the
"Relay users" graph:

1. Table with three columns

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/metrics-news-mockup-1/userstats-relay-country-table.html

2. One line of text per event (plus one line for links)

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/metrics-news-mockup-1/userstats-relay-country-text.html

3. Indentation with dates set aside and up to three lines per event for
description, tags, and links

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/metrics-news-mockup-1/userstats-relay-country-indented.html

I'm yet undecided which version I'd find most useful. I think they all
have pros and cons.

And maybe we can make a fourth or fifth version out of them.

Curious to hear your thoughts!

All the best,
Karsten

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