

WebNumbr: graph any number on the web  - tlrobinson
http://webnumbr.com/

======
fnid
First of all, I really like it. I think it is nice.

Some questions, then some thoughts, and some prognostications. What is the
OpenID box? I don't know what to put there. I don't have an openid. Will
openid be a link to the numbr? Is it my email address? I tried to click on the
OI icon inside the box to get some help, but alas, I never figured out what
that box is for and I'm a computer guy! (A ha, just got to firefox and it told
me my email address wasn't a valid openid. hmph, did it still create? Nope,
not on the first page...) Why does OpenID matter? Let me use my Email address.

Well, it's a good idea. I still like it.

When I am in Opera and I click the "Create Numbr" button, nothing happens. In
IE 7, when I enter the url and click the "Pick a numbr on the Page" button, I
get something about it not being displayed and then it was aborted and I see a
blank nothing. On my way to firefox (see above...) Couldn't save my numbr...

What I wanted to save, was the number that appears in the link at the bottom
of the first section on the cover of <http://news.google.com>. This number is
the number of articles about the "top ranked" article at google. It would show
whatever google's algorithm puts there.

But it could come from Bing or any aggregator. How popular the most popular
story at Hacker News is, etc...

I tried with text too, but it said it wasn't a number. Considering the one I
_tried_ to create, it would be nice to see what that article is, though
because of this particular topic, you could do a little research. For today,
the top article may be obvious, but what was the world talking most about on
Jan 17, 1987?

Of course the Internet wasn't around back then really, I mean, it could have
been, but WebNumbr wasn't and we can't take WebNumbr back to 1987 to figure it
out ... okay, we could do research today about how many newspapers in the
world had a particular headline for dates past, but that would be a tremendous
amount of work. It would be an undertaking so vast and incomprehensible that
we just wouldn't even do it at all.

And here, you've created a piece of equipment using the power of technology,
that without even thinking about it moving forward into the future is going to
do that very task, with almost no human interaction -- 100% automated. A task
previously thought insurmountable, on your site is being done, right _now_ 300
times an hour or so? Could be thousands, millions, even billions really. It
_is_ able to do it with a lot of numbers, like the dow, or a stock price, or
the weather on a particular day or time of day and that's very, very cool and
useful for a lot of people who track things using the web.

A lot of people have to track things, so they go to the web and type them in
and write them down, or enter them into a database. They don't have to do that
anymore.

I can understand the technical reasons to keep it to numbers only and why the
limitations are there now, but if you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of
speculation about what types of things your users will request in the future,
beyond what I've already mentioned, would be the ability to pick a particular
number _within_ a group of numbers. The numbr in the top articles I mentioned
was actually in a span with text in it, but it accurately picked the correct
number (nice work), however, what if there are multiple numbers and I want the
second one, will it still work?

What about dates and times? Maybe you want to track the numbr of days since
the last injury, which is a number, but what if the only number on the page
would be the date of the last incident? Like the X's on one of the keep
motivated articles we take in once in a while.

You also may want to alert people if the values change, I'm sure you've
thought of that. Give them thresholds to fire an event or call a web page or
post to a page, etc...

Those are just some ideas. Keep in touch. Remind us of you going into the
future so we can monitor changes and keep track of how things are going.

~~~
ptarjan
Wow, thank you for your feedback.

\-- OpenID

Leave it blank if you want (maybe I should write "optional" somewhere). I
didn't want to make a username/password scheme and openid seems like a perfect
fit.

\-- Opera, IE7

I never tested it there. Adding to list...

\-- Text associations

I've been tossing this idea around, but couldn't come up with a good way to do
multiple related extractions and plot some as labels and others as graphs and
correlating them. Maybe v2.

\-- Nicer way to query

Well my interface just lets you click and it gets that numbr. If you want
something fancier, you can write some code (XPATH) and it can happily get your
numbr. Go ahead and do substring-before and after. See this one :
<http://webnumbr.com/semantic-sm-video> and look at the xpath

\-- Alerts

yes, great idea. I also wanted highs and lows. Vote for it
[http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestio...](http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestions/449742-alert-
me-when-a-number-changes-or-hits-a-threshold)

Thanks for the feedback, its nice to see excitement over something I've built!
:)

------
seldo
Neat! I have recently been needing exactly this, as I have been obsessively
checking Avatar's box office totals to see if/when it will overtake Titanic:

<http://webnumbr.com/avatar-box-office-total>

------
shalmanese
It might be worth checking out the Reform project:
<http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/toomim/toomim-reform.pdf> and the
Zeotrope: <http://www.adobe.com/technology/pdfs/uist08zoetrope.pdf> for
explorations of this idea in an academic context.

edit: And, of course, CamelCamelCamel for amazon price tracking:
<http://camelcamelcamel.com/>

------
tlrobinson
Here's an, uh, example: <http://webnumbr.com/tlrobinson-hacker-news-karma>

(not very interesting yet but you get the idea)

------
romland
I found this a little interesting. It triggered something in me that made me
want to go out and find numbers! I settled with making a counter for Britney
Spears popularity which does a query on Google and takes the number of hits.

It's just a dirty shame that making any kind of long-term statistics will be
hard due to the screen-scraping nature of the application. Anyone's who has
ever tried scraping IMDB knows what I am talking about. :)

I like it.

~~~
ptarjan
Yeah, i agree about the scraping. The good news is you can edit your numbr (if
you registered with an openid) then you can fix your scraping.

Also, you can start a new numbr but with the history of an old numbr imported.
I don't have that in the UI (taken out due to clutter) but i'll figure out a
place to put it back.

------
Pistos2
Just showed a blank page for the "pick a number" screen when I tried to make a
number for my Stackoverflow reputation.

When trying to make one for my HN karma, it won't let me get past the next
screen. Every time I click Create Numbr, it seems to do some kind of AJAX
call, then highlights "Good Name!" with a red box. Over and over. A bug, I
guess?

~~~
ptarjan
When I run stackoverflow through tidy, I get back
"<html><body></body></html>". Vote for it
:[http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestio...](http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestions/449734-make-
it-work-for-http-stackoverflow-com-?ref=title)

As for the the ajax call, does it say "Not a number" where it shows you your
extraction? A screenshot would help a ton if you can sent it.
spam@paulisageek.com

~~~
Pistos2
It's probably an Opera-specific problem. I've created a uservoice idea/issue
for it.

------
nirmal
How about tracking HN stories from a custom interface. Starting with this one
:)

<http://webnumbr.com//points-for-hn-story-on-webnumbr>

~~~
ptarjan
I'm sure you can hack together a little input form that creates a webnumbr. :)

------
ewjordan
Good stuff, I like it a lot!

I'd love to see an export to CSV feature - graphs are nice, but having the
actual historical numbers available would be awesome.

~~~
ptarjan
You mean like... _drumroll_ <http://webnumbr.com/webnumbrs.all.json> (large,
once every hour for about 6 months).

Do you really like CSV? If so, vote and i will build it.
[http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestio...](http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestions/449740-export-
in-csv)

~~~
ewjordan
Ah, nice - that does the trick. :)

No, I have no particular taste for CSV, though some people like it because you
can open the files in Excel without any conversion. Personally I usually use
data in code instead, and JSON is better there.

You might consider putting a link to these files in the page, unless you think
it might become a big resource drain.

------
ptarjan
Heh, you guys are awesome.

Here is the number of numbrs <http://webnumbr.com/webnumbrs>

------
jrnkntl
I can't create one, it keeps telling me: "You do not own that identity" while
I certainly -do- own that OpenID and am logged in.

~~~
ptarjan
Interesting. Can you email me your openid that you're trying?

spam@paulisageek.com

------
sh1mmer
Funny, this was made during an internal y! hack day months ago. It's weird to
see it surface now.

~~~
ptarjan
I just showed it at super happy dev house.

------
m_eiman
Neat, but the value axis in the plots should be zero based, or at least have
that as an option.

~~~
ptarjan
Good plan. vote for it
:[http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestio...](http://webnumbr.uservoice.com/forums/38506-general/suggestions/449738-add-
option-to-make-axis-plot-0-based)

------
koobe
Doesn't work very well when the number has thousands separated with a space.

~~~
ptarjan
Example? I thought I covered that case.

------
matwiemann
Great, more numbers pulled out of context. Especially if you embed.

------
richcollins
Weird I was just looking for something like this.

------
btucker
funny, i created this exact same thing about 4 years ago. Got it all working
and then lost interest before launching it.

------
gills
in "embed code for graph": 'allowTransparnecy' should be 'allowTransparency.'

~~~
ptarjan
thanks! fixed

------
z8000
What a great idea!

------
pclark
This is awesome.

------
mastershake
useless data visualization, is this spam? #ITS use FLOT, it's awesome.

~~~
tlrobinson
No. Are you a troll?

------
hugs
This is both the coolest and dumbest thing I've seen all day.

~~~
ptarjan
pfff! I agree with 1/2 of your statement.

