[metrics-team] Demo: metrics timeline table underneath graphs

[Karsten Loesing]

On 2017-10-29 00:10, David Fifield wrote:
> At the Montreal meeting, we had a session on annotating metrics graphs
> with timeline entries:
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Montreal/Notes/MetricsTimelineWorkshop
> 
> Karsten had the idea of putting a table underneath each graph, as an
> intermediate step before annotating the graphs themselves.
> 
> I thought it was a good idea and I wanted to see what it would look
> like, so I added it to my multi-graph page:
> https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?start=2016-10-01&end=2017-01-01&country=tr#timeline

Great! Thanks for starting this!

> On the actual Tor Metrics pages, there would not be so many entries,
> because we would tailor the entries to fit each graph. For example, the
> userstats-relay-country graph would not have entries that are specific
> to one pluggable transport. What I implemented for this page is
> basically the union of all the entries that apply to any of the three
> graphs, in one big table. So, for the URL I linked, the table contains
> all the entries where "place" is either empty (meaning global) or
> contains "tr", also filtered by date range.
> 
> The way this works is, I wrote a program to parse the wikitext of the
> MetricsTimeline page and output JSON. Then I copied the JSON into a data
> structure in the source code of the page. So it won't update itself or
> anything like that. For the source code of the parser program, check out
> https://www.bamsoftware.com/git/tor-metrics-country.git

That's pretty close to what I had in mind for the Tor Metrics website.

There's one thing that we might want to do differently, and that
concerns the presentation as actual table vs. news entries as they
appear on https://metrics.torproject.org/news.html.

Ideally, news entries would appear the same on the news page and on
graphs pages.

So, one thing I'd want to try is to flatten the news entries to fit into
a single line. Right now, there's a line break after the
transport/country tags and after the description, both of which seem
unnecessary.

Can you imagine reordering items in a way that they read well on a
single line? Maybe it means moving tags to the line end and enclosing
links in parentheses. Or maybe something different?

I think if each entry just needs a single line below graphs, possibly
wrapped around, that would make the page a bit more readable. And
another effect would be that the news page wouldn't require as much
whitespace around entries anymore and shrink to ~1/2 the current length.

Unless the table format has advantages over simple text lines, in which
case we should consider changing the presentation of the news page for
consistency.

Regarding using JSON for entries, here's our JSON file that we're using
for the news page and that we're updating using a non-public Java class
that I simply didn't bother cleaning up and publishing anywhere yet:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/tree/website/src/main/resources/etc/news.json

Thanks!

All the best,
Karsten

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