Google Spreadsheet Template for getting social activity around RSS feeds

The ‘Deprecated notice’ is because the access to the Topsy API (which is used to extract Twitter activity) is now behind a developer key.

A post from Alan Levine (@cogdog) on Syndication Machines (plus syndication of syndication) which details how feeds for the cMOOC course ds106 are aggregated and resyndicated got me thinking if there was additional data around student blog posts that could be usefully captured. Previously for something like that I would have turned to PostRank Analytics, which allowed you to specify any rss feed and it would aggregate social activity like tweets, bookmarks from a wide range of services and let you see it all in one place. Unfortunately PostRank were bought by Google and while some of this data is now accessible from Google Analytics it’s restricted to your account and data from social networks Google isn’t directly competing with.
So I thought it would be useful/interesting to start looking at what social activity you could pull together without authenticated access or API keys. So far I’ve identified couple and given some overlap with other work (and some late night play time), I’ve come up with a Google Spreadsheet template which pulls data together from comment feeds, Twitter and Delicious (with social counts for these plus Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+). You can give the spreadsheet a try with the link below:

*** Blog Activity Data Feed Template ***

Blog Activity Data Feed Template Overview

Features

  • Collects last 10 posts from a RSS feed
  • Uses sharedcount.com to get overall post share counts from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Delicious
  • For supported blogs (mainly manila WordPress) extracts comment snippets
  • Uses Topsy to collect tweets mentioning the post
  • Fetches all the Delicious bookmarks for the post url
  • Summarises activity from comments, tweets and bookmarks on the dashboard

You can make as many copies of the template as you like to track other RSS feeds.
If you prefer a slightly different overview then the RSS Feed Social Share Counting Google Spreadsheet gives a table of share counts for a feed

*** RSS Feed Social Share Counter ***

Social share count matrix

Technical highlights

There are a couple of cool things under-the-hood for the Activity Data template worth noting.

Managed Library = Easy to add more sources

So far I’ve limited the template to sources that have easy access. Previously if an API disappeared, changed or I discover another service I would have to modify the template and users would have to make a fresh copy. With Managed Libraries the Google Spreadsheet template now only needs 11 lines of code (shown below) for 3 custom formulas (see cells Dashboard!C8, and #n!G2 and #n!B8).

function getSharedCountActivity(url){
  return socialActivity.getSharedCount(url);
}
function getItemFeed(url, num){
  return socialActivity.getItemRSSFeed(url, num)
}
function getActivityFeed(url){
  return socialActivity.getActivityFeed(url);
}

Because the template uses my own socialActivity library and because I’ve left the template in Development Mode when I update the code changes should (I hope) filter to all the existing templates in use. This means if I can add more services with open APIs details should start appearing on the post activity pages (denoted with # at the beginning).

Fun with sparklines

Activity SparklinesIf you were wondering how I did the activity sparklines, here’s how. Sparklines are a built-in Google Spreadsheet formula (here’s the  reference). To get them to work you need some data if you want some options. For the data all you need is an array of values and sparkline will plot them equally spaced.
In this use case I’ve got comments, tweets, and bookmarks with date/times. To plot the sparkline I need to know how many of these were made between specific time periods. Another function we can use to get this data is FREQUENCY. This lets us specify some intervals and source data and returns an array of the frequency of data points.
One issue is that for each post the activity range varies, so one post might only have activity in July, and another in August. There are other formula (MIN/MAX) to get the range values. Here’s how the final solution was pieced together.
On each post sheet (prefixed with ‘#’) in cells A1:A20 are some formula to calculate date intervals based on the minimum and maximum date ranges. Frequency data used for each sparkline is then calculated inside the sparkline formula by indirectly looking at the data in each post sheet. The indirectly part is handled by the INDIRECT formula which evaluates a cell reference from other cell values. So on row 9 of Dashboard INDIRECT(B9&”!D9:D”) evaluates to ‘#1!D9:D’, row 10 is ‘#2!D9:D and so on. I could have hardcoded these cell references but I prefer the ‘clever’ way. Here’s part of the final formula with a breakdown of what it does:

SPARKLINE(FREQUENCY(INDIRECT(B9&”!D9:D”),INDIRECT(B9&”!A1:A20″)),{“charttype”,”line”;”ymin”,-1;”ymax”,MAX(FREQUENCY(INDIRECT(B9&”!D9:D”),INDIRECT(B9&”!A1:A20″)))+1} )

  • INDIRECT(B9&”!D9:D”) – Frequency data source built using INDIRECT which evaluates a cell reference from other cell values. On row 9 of Dashboard this evaluates to ‘#1!D9:D’, row 10 is ‘#2!D9:D
  • INDIRECT(B9&”!A1:A20″) – similar trick to get an interval array for the FREQUENCY formula
  • FREQUENCY(INDIRECT(B9&”!D9:D”),INDIRECT(B9&”!A1:A20″)) – gives our sparkline data array
  • MAX(FREQUENCY(… – get the maximum value from the frequency data just so we can add 1 to it to give a margin on the sparkline

Summary

Hopefully you’ll enjoy and if you can think of any improvements or other services to tap into just get in touch.

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