I've been working on a statistics tool for us EBTers for the last months, given that NIG's lack of updates have decreased its usefulness. I completely fail at naming things so I just stuck with "EBT stats tool" or EBTST for short. Now that it has reached a point where its feature set is more or less complete and all the critical bugs hopefully have gone away, it's time to release it to the world.
Usage
You don't have to download or install anything, EBTST lives here and it's usable right now. Registration is needed, though, otherwise the program wouldn't be able to keep track of each users' data.
Upon registration, you are invited to upload your CSV files. Depending on their size and the speed of your connection, that might take a while. Hopefully there's a progress bar to inform you about it. When the upload ends, EBTST analyzes the CSVs searching for errors in the notes and figuring out which ECB president signed them, among other things. This "import" procedure has its own progress bar too. After that, you're directed to the "Information" section, which is pretty much the same as NIG's. From that point on, you can browse the sections at the left.
This is the "private" part of EBTST, only you can see it. For generating the public stats, you can use the "BBCode/HTML" link that is near the bottom of the sections listing. Check the boxes of the sections you want to publish and then click that link. When the process ends, a new window/tab will open containing the relevant BBCode (which you can copy/paste to the forum) and a link to the HTML stats, which will be of the form "https://dserrano5.es/ebt/ebtst/stats/<your username>".
Beware, though, that any pop-up blocker that you may have installed will probably prevent EBTST from opening that window/tab. If that's the case, you'll have to allow pop-ups from dserrano5.es. Rest assured that I don't have plans to insert any kind of advertisement in the program . Related to this is the need of having javascript enabled in order to the progress bars to work, so any javascript blocker you may have installed (e.g. NoScript) has to be configured to allow javascript from dserrano5.es.
Highlights
EBTST is open source . There's a github repository with the source code, which you can download and use on your own if you like.
EBTST is fully translatable. Right now there's a file called es.txt containing the Spanish translation. If you want to translate it to some other language, download it (this is the raw copy) and change the sentences at the right of the equals signs. Most of them are self-explanatory; however the help related paragraphs are different. Check out the file en.txt for their meanings. When you've finished, send me the edited file and I'll include it in the application.
Lowlights
Several sections feature a couple of Unicode characters that may not show correctly in your browser (some test users reported that they were unable to see them). If there's a significant fraction of users with problems, I might change them. They are:
- U+2714 (HEAVY CHECK MARK, ✔)
- U+00D7 (MULTIPLICATION SIGN, ×)
- U+2192 (RIGHTWARDS ARROW, →)
- U+2194 (LEFT RIGHT ARROW, ↔)
Users with more than 5000 hits may notice a delay at the end of the "import" procedure (you know, the progress bar reaches 95% and then seems to stop there ). I will fix this but in the meanwhile, please be patient. A minute or two should be enough to let the process end.
The login and register forms don't have any kind of error reporting ("bad user/password", "invalid user", "already existing user" and so on). Needless to say I will correct this too.
EBTST could be faster but it's installed on a machine with no more than 4 Gb RAM so I had to sacrifice some speed to keep the memory usage low. Power users will see that their operations are somewhat slow, but this is all I can do. I tested with 1.9 millons of notes.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the spanish community for trying EBTST and uncovering lots of errors and problems, ranging from trivial to fatal, as well as suggesting new ideas. They are, in chronological order, Celtium, Adela Merchan, Vicente1712, Skybang, Angelino, minyonet, rakoon, TXATXE, Manaies, dargqui, lordsox, golosinas, quetzal02 (now living in France), Akai-DDragonNk, Victorius, gugus, Murbella, bendder, Crawler360 and groucho. Some non-spanish users who also helped were giulcenc&family, MDeen and Math Murderer. Thank you all!