Hello All,

I've been working hard on the, "prototype_to_jquery" branch of Dada Mail,

    https://github
com/justingit/dada-mail/tree/prototype_to_jquery 

in an attempt to modernize Dada Mail a bit It's a long process and is full of growing pains, but hopefully will be worth it in the long run vitality of the app A lot of it has been simply porting over the JavaScript from the Prototype/Scriptaculous way of doing things to the jQuery/jQueryui way of doing things

I've gotten myself into sort of a never-ending hole, once I got to the Tracker plugin, as it uses a ton of visualizations and - well, I found out that the way I've been creating them has been superseded by a new, shinier way of doing things, so I've been moving everything over to that With that change, the plugin gain a ton of user-interactivity, which I hope means the plugin will be more useful to people

I've kind of gotten visualization-happy, and I've been working on other parts of Dada Mail that may benefit from seeing data in a chart/graph, rather than just straight up tabular data

One of these places is the, "List Activity" screen, which shows the last x things events that have happened on your mailing list (Subscribes, Unsubscribes, etc)

This is all well and good, but it's hard to glance at all the data, and know the general trend of your mailing list Like, are more people subscribing to your list, or leaving it? Enter some visualizations

Attached is a small chart I whipped up today, that goes through the history of one of my mailing list (the last 180 days, or so), and graphs out the subscriptions, unsubscriptions, as well as the cumulative result of both

From the chart, you can see, that in the 180 day period, there were more subscriptions, then unsubscriptions, that subscribers are adding themselves fairly linearly, and the unsubscribes happen in bunches - which makes sense: I'm sure if I cross-reference the time unsubscriptions happen, it would be after a mass mailing, and most likely, from the bounce handler, cleaning out bouncing addresses I don't manually add subscribers in the list control panel, so there are now huge jumps Subscriptions are done via a subscription form on the website A little less than 1 5 Subscriptions/day or so

You can't tell in this screenshot, but all points on the graph are interactive, so you can see the exact value of each point, by simply mousing over it Pretty handy

I may play around with having a visualization for mass mailings, so you can see some sort of speed of delivery over time - to see if there's any variation in sending speed May be of use, or maybe not Not sure yet!

Anyways, a taste to things to come I somewhat accidentally rewrote the majority of the Tracker plugin's UX (and most of the code backend, too - whoops) This branch has a thousands of line additions/deletions/changes to the app (as of my writing: 74 changed files with 4,651 additions and 3,798 deletions ) Most likely, when it's released, it's become v6 of Dada Mail You heard it here, first,