Hey Kiva Friends - your help needed!

[Guest]

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[Sherri]

Hi Everyone,

I'm working on doing some nice graphs for Joe of the Kiva stats which will be auto generated from grabbing the stats off the Kiva site each night and saving to a database (pending permission from Kiva, still waiting for a response).

I need your help to create some test data that I can put in my database for the purposes of testing what I'm working on. If any of you know what the Total Loans value has been each day for maybe the last month or so, I could use this data (best in an Excel spreadsheet) in this format:

Date, Loans Amount, Loan Amount Change From Previous Day, Number of Lenders, Change In Lenders:

2007-12-01, 15000000, 1000, 158530, 150
2007-12-02, 15006000, 6000, 158730, 200
2007-12-03, 15008000, 2000, 158830, 100

Real values are best, or you could make up a set of values for me (as close to the current numbers as possible). I need at least one month worth. If you have the real stats for November- that would be even better! If you can't make an excel file... then a comma separated list like the above is the second best option... I think...

or if you REALLY want to get fancy, you could make it into SQL (database language) statements for me so I can put it directly into my database, like so:

INSERT INTO `kiva_stats_daily` VALUES (NULL, '2007-12-01', 15800410, 1354, 158530, 150);
INSERT INTO `kiva_stats_daily` VALUES (NULL, '2007-12-02', 15809410, 9000, 158730, 200);
INSERT INTO `kiva_stats_daily` VALUES (NULL, '2007-12-03', 15811410, 2000, 158830, 100);

THAT would be very helpful. Hopefully these graphs will be a nice addition to the KivaFriends site. See work in progress here:

EDIT - NEW LINKS!
http://www.start.ofitall.com/kiva/stats/stats-graphs.php?graph=1  (Total Loans)
http://www.start.ofitall.com/kiva/stats/stats-graphs.php?graph=2  (Loans Daily)
http://www.start.ofitall.com/kiva/stats/stats-graphs.php?graph=3  (Total # Of Lenders)
http://www.start.ofitall.com/kiva/stats/stats-graphs.php?graph=4  (Daily New Lenders)

(Note: please do not add these links to your websites, this is not the final home of these charts... they will be on the kivafriends.org website soon).

Thank you thank you!!!

[KivanSteven]

Sherri this sounds awesome, Ive been thinking about it myself, just hoping someone would catch on to the idea...I was just in the process of making a bunch of really cool and informative graphs for my Kiva Loan excel file that Christopher put together for us, when I came across your post. 

Im not sure the daily numbers are readily available somewhere accessible to any of us, unless someone was keeping track themselves, I could be wrong but Ive never seen them.  If thats something you need and we cant retrieve those figures, we might have to start keeping track each day in the current month.

If Joe puts a tab at the top for visual graphics/charts, might I also suggest an overall progression line graph of total accumulated Kiva loans in $$, and also total accumulated Kiva members...these could automatically update as well.  It would be great for newcomers and nice to track from month to month in a way that the results could more easily be understood and interpreted.

[Sherri]

Hi Steve,

I was mostly needing last month's data for testing purposes. I have officially got permission from Kiva to begin grabbing the daily data from their website each night to save in a database. So, everything is ok with them. They even gave me the link to a RSS feed of their stats which makes things much easier for me.

I'm going to start off with bar graphs because these can be generated quickly without images (easier on the server load when there's lots of hits to the site). If there is a strong preference for line graphs despite the risk of extra bandwidth usage, I may try line charts as a later 'upgrade' to the feature (line graphs are more complicated as well).

We'll see. I was also thinking that $ loaned and # of new members each day would be the 2 best stats to graph for now. Stay tuned!

If anyone can make up some test data (the math has to work) instead of real data, that would be just as good for testing purposes... 

[KivanSteven]

Great Sherri, thanks for the info...look forward to seeing what you come up with...and let us know if there's anything else we might be able to assist with if need be...I think your assumption that loan $$ and members are the two best stats to start with is right on.

[Sherri]

Update:

I have the programming done that grabs the Kiva-supplied RSS feed from their site, scans it, and saves the 4 pertinent values to the database. I have it set up on my server to run nightly, for a while so I can monitor it and see how it works for a few days.

I also have 4 graphs working (see new links in my first post).

Obviously these will look better once we have a full 30 days of data in there.

Note you can hold your mouse over the bar and it will show the actual value for that bar.

[KivanSteven]

These are great!    They'll be a hit here and I look forward to browsing the stats as they accumulate.

[Sherri]

Joe suggested that he's going to put them all onto one page to view easily, instead of trying to cram them into that box at the top.

So, everyone here they are aggregated onto one page. Each day, you should see another day of stats on there (it will show the last 30 days- once the data exists). Please provide any positive or negative feedback if you can think of improvements.. colour, size, aesthetics, etc.

Also, please test in various web browsers and let me know if anything looks funny. I have tested in Firefox and IE6.

http://www.start.ofitall.com/kiva/stats/include-test.php

Thank you!!

[Dottie b]

Thanks for doing this!

Couple of suggestions - in the interest of readability - could you please make the color darker, the numbers larger, and put a couple of tick marks on the bar - or make it a real graph?

Dottie B

[Sherri]

Thanks Dottie,

I will look at darkening the bar colour. I have to wait on adjusting the size of the numbers until I know how wide the graph will be with all 30 days of data. Now that I will be showing the graphs on a full page, I may have more spare room...

I can't add tick marks to the vertical axis.. the bar heights are only approximations. (mouse over the bar for the real numbers).

Real line graphs may be an enhancement for the future, though they are significantly more difficult to do, and slower to generate. We'll see.

Thanks for the feedback!

[KivanSteven]

Looks very nice...like Dottie a slightly darker color might help a bit...also will this page just show the current month or once we get into next year and so forth will past month stats be made available, maybe through links that will display on a separate page?  Just curious.  Nice contribution though.