StatsMix will have a maintenance window this Thursday evening, April 5, from 9pm – 10pm MST.

We apologize for any inconvenience, but this is necessary for us to improve the performance of both our application and our API.

All systems may be unavailable during this time, though we do not anticipate taking the entire window for our updates.

Please follow us on Twitter for any updates during the maintenance and feel free to contact us with any questions.

As we’ve increased the options to configure StatsMix dashboards, we realized we needed a much better way of easily adding widgets. As a result, we’re happy to announce that we’ve released a completely re-designed dashboard widget builder.

Previously, we offered about a dozen pre-built widget types for our customers to choose from when managing their dashboards. Our new widget builder turns that around and offers a fully customized experience.

We now have a single widget builder that allows you to select every option based on the metrics (what kind and how many) you want to display. From this, you can pick the content type (chart, tabbed content, custom HTML, RSS feed, or mentions) and then the various options specific to each.

Here’s a short video (1 minute) that show the new dashboard widget builder in action:

In our early testing with some customers, we’ve found this new widget builder system to be a much better and more efficient way of managing StatsMix dashboards.

Let us know what you think!

We’re excited to announce we’ve released into beta a JavaScript library for StatsMix. The new library provides a quick and easy way to track any action or event on a website. Use this to track page views, conversions, downloads, or just about anything else you can think of.

Using our JavaScript library, a metric’s value (along with any metadata) will be sent to StatsMix every time a page loads.

To use it, you’ll just need to follow these steps:

1. Create a new custom metric in StatsMix
2. Copy/paste the JavaScript sample code to send a new data point to StatsMix:

<script type="text/javascript">;
    var sm_token = 'METRIC_TOKEN'; // the metric token will be populated for you
    var sm_value = 1; // replace sm_value with any numeric value.
    var sm_meta = '';
    /*
      to add metadata, assign a JSON object to the variable sm_meta:
      var sm_meta = {'food':'ice cream','flavor':'chocolate'};
    */
    var sm_prefix = document.location.protocol == 'https://' ? 'https://' : 'http://';
    document.write(unescape('%3Cscript src="' + sm_prefix + 'http://statsmix.com/stat.js" type="text/javascript"%3E%3C/script%3E'))
</script>;

3. Paste this script on any page you wish to track

If you’re interested in using the JavaScript library during beta, please contact us. If you don’t already have a StatsMix account, you can sign up for one here.

Urban Airship recently wrote about building and maintaining their company culture. One of the more interesting points was a focus on making sure employees know the company’s key metrics.

What are the real Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business? For a long time we thought it was the number of notifications we were sending. While interesting, and certainly an indication of growth, we view the total number of pushes being sent as just one of the KPIs.

We have a big board in both of our offices (inspired by the one at Panic just down the street) that displays our real-time KPIs across the entire company. This is more than just up-time and number of notifications, but metrics like revenue, pipeline, incoming leads and average time to close that show we are on target with our plan. These are real KPIs and they live on our big board which everyone passes by several times a day.

We have numerous customers tell us they do the same, creating office status boards with StatsMix dashboards. Letting everyone view up-to-date key metrics as they walk around the office definitely reminds them of their overall importance and hopefully starts to align goals. Determining the specific metrics to display, though, is another topic altogether.

I recommend reading the entire article on building a company culture as it’s full of great insights.

We launched a major update to our dashboard and charting tools. StatsMix customers now have complete control over the appearance of their dashboards and much more fine-grained control for individual charts.

Dashboard widgets are now completely re-sizable with free-form placement. After adding a dashboard widget, it can be re-sized to almost any shape and placed in any configuration on a dashboard. These changes then also appear on any shared dashboards as well. You can also extend the height of a dashboard just by dragging it down.

Here’s a quick demo video that illustrates the new functionality:

Overall, the big improvements are:

Dashboards

• Completely re-sizable dashboard widgets
• Free-form placement of dashboard widgets
• Change the size of the dashboard height to accommodate any widget configuration
• New pie chart dashboard widget

Individual Charts

• New, easy-to-use controls for chart type options
• Additional chart types – spline, area, pie, and area-spline
• New, easy-to-use controls for data grouping options
• Additional data grouping options – real-time and hourly
• An improved date range picker

StatsMix automatically converted your dashboards, but please double check their appearance (especially your shared ones).

Let us know if you have any questions or help with any of these new features.

Landing pages are a staple of modern Internet marketing efforts and there’s a great service called Unbounce that makes the process incredibly easy.

While exploring their app the other day, I noticed they offered the ability to use webhooks. If you’re unfamilar with webhooks, they allow you to push notifications from one web service to another with no extra coding.

Looking at their partners page, I was intrigued with how fast ActiveCampaign built a webhook to support Unbounce in 89 minutes. Knowing how the StatsMix API works (and some of our interesting use cases), I figured I could beat that time by about 87 minutes!

So here’s what I did with StatsMix, right “out-of-the-box”, with no additional coding on our back-end. (i.e. I did the same thing any StatsMix customer can do right now.)

1. Created a new custom metric in StatsMix
2. Grabbed the sample code to send a new data point to StatsMix:
   http://statsmix.com/api/v2/stats?api_key=API_KEY&value=1&profile_id=1234&metric_id=12345
3. Pasted this link into the Unbounce webhook form field

And that’s it! Whenever someone submits a form on the Unbounce landing page, a value of 1 will be sent to StatsMix for that metric. So for an “Unbounce Form Submissions” metric (or whatever you want to call it), you can track this on a dashboard and/or correlate it against any other metric you’re tracking in StatsMix.

Again, this works “out-of-the-box” due to how we built the StatsMix API. The POST to the stats resource in our API is essentially a bare-bones webhook for almost any web service.

I’ll be exploring more services with webhook capabilities and writing up the results, but in the meantime let me know if you try using our API as a webhook with any other web service.

So try it out and start pushing real-time data to StatsMix with no coding using webhooks!

Once you setup metrics and dashboards in StatsMix, you often want to control the look and feel of those reports for your team, customers, or the public.

While we’ve had some existing options to change the branding, they were limited to this point. But that’s all changed! We’ve just launched a completely updated way to change the appearance of any dashboard or metric as well as making it possible to white label them. This is especially useful you’re sharing dashboards with customers.

Here’s what we’ve added and enhanced:

• ability to remove all StatsMix branding
• add your own custom CSS
• upload your own logo
• add a custom domain
• password protection for shared dashboards and charts

Here’s more detail on each new feature:

Remove StatsMix Branding

By default, any shared dashboard or metric is wrapped in a nicely formatted StatsMix branding. On Standard plans and higher, you can now easily remove any and all references to StatsMix and customize the look and feel using the next few options.

Add Your Own CSS

Add your own CSS to fully customize the look and feel of any shared report. The only limit is your design skill! Contact us if you need any assistance in this area.

Upload a Logo

You can now upload a logo that can be displayed on shared dashboards or metrics.

Use a Custom Domain

The default sharing URL follows this format: www.statsmix.com/x/random_token. We now offer the abilty to use any domain in place of www.statsmix.com. For example, your shared dashboards and charts can now have a URL that looks like this: metrics.mycompany.com/x/random_token. Once again, we now allow you to fully remove all mention of StatsMix as needed.

Password Protection

For any shared dashboard or metric, you can now also assign a password when setting up sharing. Passwords are unique to each shared dashboard or metric, giving you full control over access.

Most of these features apply to our Pro plans and higher. You can see the full list on our pricing page.

We now offer the ability to create PDFs on the fly for any of your StatsMix dashboards.

With just a single click, you can now download a nicely formatted PDF of your dashboard.

To create a dashboard PDF, just click on the sharing icon from the dashboard view (be sure to turn on sharing for that dashboard) and select “generate dashboard”. That’s it!

StatsMix will have a maintenance window this Thursday evening, November 17 from 8pm – 9pm MST.

We apologize for any inconvenience, but this is necessary for us to improve our infrastructure.

All systems may be unavailable during this time, though we do not anticipate taking the entire window.

Please follow us on Twitter for any updates during the maintenance and feel free to contact us with any questions.

We’re happy to announce StatsMix is one of the sponsors for the API Hackday in Boulder tomorrow, November 8:

API HackDay brings developers together for an all-day coding fest focused on building apps with APIs. Developers of all experience levels can share ideas, collaborate on projects, start new ventures and discover great tools and new APIs to play with.

We’ll be hacking away all day at the Microsoft Bing offices in downtown Boulder.

Registration is free and you can still sign up here: http://apihackdayboulder.eventbrite.com/

This will be a great event to meet local developers/companies and win some prizes. Hope to see you there!