Gather analytics data and use it to promote content

[daveaglick]

Spoke with @cecilphillip about an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a little while - it would be cool to get some metrics on what folks are clicking on and then use that in the site.

Here's some ideas:

• A list of the most popular blog posts from the last week (also exposed as an API endpoint)
• Popular projects (and API endpoint)
• A little "hot" icon next to things getting a lot of attention
• Sparklines that show relative traffic

Cecil suggested Application Insights might be a good tool for this. It could track and gather the analytics, and then the build process could query for any data it needs from the Application Insights REST API.

[daveaglick]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. One idea I had is to pull engagement data from other APIs:

• Feedly (will need to pull posts for each feed, match them up, then get the Feedly engagement stat
• Reddit (total or average number of votes across instances of link)
• Twitter (total posts + retweets of given content)
• Hacker News
• Application Insights click tracking

We’ll need some way to combine these. First thought is to normalize each metric from 0 - 100, average them, then subtract 10 (or some other number) per day so stuff falls off over time.