Thanks for the update - late reply due to being on holiday here...
@ scribe:
Thank you for your nifty tool, today I compared its results with mine and they match pretty well (some differences due to differing ways to count or different due days). I would like to update my graph solely based on your tool, but in order to do that I would like to know what dates exactly it uses to set the numbers for its output, like what calendar day (and time) does it set for March 2012 for example?
Good question - because it's based on wiki edits, I used the
latest edit available for each month, i.e. state of the wiki page at the end of each month. I could change this to use the first edit of the month fairly easily, if that's better - or possibly an average of the two. (I'm not keen on averaging all edits, just to avoid hammering the wiki...)
Some more info/ideas from my blogpost write-up here:
http://bitcoinlife.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/counting-bitcoin-merchants/Also, I like the google docs table you have provided. Unfortunately the graph looks disgusting from an aethetic point of view. Is there any way to beautify it a bit? Unfortunately, I cannot alter anything on there to make it look different, maybe you can? Would it in those regards even be possible to have an ever updating graph on the front post?
Yeah, Google Docs is, uh, "basic" - to be kind. Colours are basically flat, Google-style. Highcharts is much nicer in terms of output - I'll see if I can change the JSON output to feed out as Highcharts format, but not sure how easy it is to then save that as an image somewhere.
Would also be good to save stats into a database rather than pulling from the wiki history each time (for historical data) - and maybe do a version for the German list...
Edit: Highcharts output wasn't too tricky. Still need to play with the look, but a first draft version exists here, with "export as image" button included in top-right corner:
http://www.exmosis.net/btctt/highchart.phpNot sure why older categories don't show up, so there's a bit of a mismatch before the start of 2012. Also managed to get it to read the script's previous JSON output, so I don't have to scrape the whole history each time the script runs now. (Easier than handling a database...) I'll set it up at some point to run daily, at which point the highcharts page above should at least update the latest figure whenever changes to the wiki page are made.