Pageflakes fans can bring Zvents to to their startpage with a great flake from Wendy in our community of developers. The Zvents Event Search flake supports our what/when/where search for things to do and venues with results sorted by date or relevance.My search for concerts in San Francisco this weekend turned up O.A.R. (a personal favorite for “That Was a Crazy Game of Poker”) at The Warfield and the jazzy, folk pop of The Samples at Cafe-du-Nord.

A search in venues for “baseball” returns the obvious AT&T Park, home of the 2007 MLB All-star Game as well as the San Francisco Exploratorium. Why, you might ask? We’re discovering all sorts of things for you to do.

Add the Zvents Event Search flake to your startpage and start discovering things to do.By the way, Zvents Developer API provides programmatic access to objects including events, venues, groups, and tags, stored in Zvents. Using the API is as simple as:

1. Login to your Zvents account and generate an API key
2. Read the documentation
3. Get hacking

If you have any suggestions for improvements to the APIs or have created an application, let us know.(thanks Wendy!)

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So you’ve just finished embedding that shiny, new widget on your webpage. Now what? While you might get great personal satisfaction from the new functionality, is it working for your readers/users? Did they notice the new feature? How much are they using it? What content within the widget is the most popular?

These are the kinds of questions you may be asking yourself. Unfortunately, many of us don’t have web analytics in place. Even if you have that luxury, the analytics package might not be able to deal with typical widget configurations – remote content embedded within an iframe or content inserted through javascript. On top of all that, your analytics package will typically give you only basic utilization information with little or no insight into how the widget information is really consumed.

Zvents is a widget provider and these are the kinds of questions that our users are asking. And now we have a great answer in the form of widget analytics. Anyone who embeds one of our widgets on their website now has access to a set of reports detailing various forms usage. Here’s an example report showing page views views per unique visitor on our beta servers over a 5 day span.

Here’s another report showing the most popular search categories used on a partner site.

We offer a fairly extensive set of widgets including calendars, event search widgets, event lists, single event detail and venue detail pages. As far as widgets go, there’s a fairly rich interaction with the user. This gives us the opportunity to capture all sorts of interesting information from the access logs. Here are some of the reports that we support right now (more on the way soon):

Utilization

• page views
• unique visitors
• page views per visit
• event views
• venue views
• searches
• rss hits
• ical hits

Contributed Content

• events submitted
• registrations

Content Analysis

• top search terms (what, when and where)
• top events
• top venues
• top categories by search

As an aside: we don’t have automatic domain verification yet, so you have to contact us to gain access to your reports. We’ll automate that soon using a mechanism similar to Google’s webmaster verification.

Here’s a brief overview of the technical details. All of our widgets are driven through javascript. Widgets pull data from our servers using JSON over HTTP. This means that all user behavior is captured in our access logs. Since each individual widget is identified by a unique referrer URL, it’s fairly simple to parse the logs and accumulate usage data for each widget separately. From there, we stuff the data into summary table in the database and present it to the user using Gruff – a terrific graphic package for Ruby on Rails built on topic of ImageMagick. Many thanks to those two projects for making it easy to make really cool graphs.

-Tyler

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