Some Useful Charts for your DIY Monitoring Tools

You should already have read:

Brendan's article: HOW TO: CREATE A NEWS TRACKER WITH NETVIBES

My article: SOME USEFUL RSS/ATOM FEEDS FOR YOUR MONITORING TOOLS

We use Google Trends to track search volume (although we may upgrade to the really quite neat Google Insights):

how to

We use Technorati charts to track blog activity:

And we use BoardReader to track activity on forums and boards:

Here - for the first time - are the code snippets we use. It's very slightly trickier to use than the RSS feeds from my last post, but well worth the fiddle.

With all of these, you should be able to copy the code directly into your own monitoring tools. We use the HTML widget in Netvibes to display the charts. Note that you'll need to edit the query to suit your needs; the red bits below show you the bits that need changing.

The %22 and %20 stuff is essential; the query is URL-encoded and it won't work if you break it!

If you're only searching on one word, then you can remove all the junk - so for example this is absolutely fine:

q=hello

...but this will break the query:

q="hello world"

You need to switch any quote marks for %22 and any spaces for %20 like this:

q=%22hello%20world%22

It looks like a bit of a fiddle, but it's pretty easy once you get used to it. So; here are the code snippets. Copy them into a text editor like Window's Notepad or the excellent (and free) Notepad++ (my current favourite text editor for Windows. If you're using a Mac, and you don't already use a text editor, you might want to try the free text editor TextWrangler. Make sure that there aren't any nasty gaps in the code that follows the src element (because that will break the charts.) Then paste it into whatever you're using (which can be anything from a blog post to Netvibes, to iGoogle's HTML/Javascript gadget to whatever you're using...) Happy charting!

Google Trends

<img src="http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=%22porter%20novelli%22&graph=weekly_img&sa=N"/>

Technorati Charts

<img src="http://technorati.com/chartimg/%22porter%20novelli%22?size=m&days=30"/>

Board Reader

<iframe src="http://boardreader.com/trendy/index.html?tns=1&t[0]=%22porter%20novelli%22&dss=l6m&dpts=week&dm=abs&ds=small&dt=bar&tm=basic&m=plot&export=1" style="margin:0;display:block;" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="350" height="305"></iframe>

Do make sure no gap in the code after the src element!