UEN Exclusive: Interview with the creator of the “Heart-O-Matic”
How are your hearts today?
If you haven’t seen it yet, the newest exciting Etsy tool is not on Etsy at all, it’s a third-party tool called the Heart-O-Matic. This is an unofficial site run and designed by Etsy seller Juln.etsy.com.
The tool has multiple functions:
- you can view a list of everyone who has hearted your shop, with time and date stamps.(you cannot see names of secret admirers)
- you can view the number of hearts each of your items, with time and date stamps, without having to view each item separately. (displayed 15 items per page)
- You can view the names of everyone who has hearted each item, with time and date stamps. (you cannot see names of secret admirers)
- You can see the hearts for any specified item by listing number
- You can see how many shop hearts you have gotten in the past Past 24 hours, Past Three Days, Past Week, or Past Month, arranged chronologically.
- You can search your hearts for a specific user
- You can see a total of all your item views, per page of your shop.
All of the Heart-o-Matic results are on simple, quick-loading HTML pages. (no flash dizzy swirlies!) If you have so many hearts that trying to view them crashes your browser, the Heart-o-Matic will make heart tracking and stat keeping much easier. This is also especially useful for tracking new hearts and views to determine the effectiveness of any ads you might have bought, either showcase ads on Etsy or ads outside of Etsy.
Juln agreed to give an exclusive interview to UEN about this new sellers tool.
UEN: What inspired you to create the Heart-O-Matic?
Juln: Hearts are the one of the most important pieces of data a seller can use to gauge response to activity on Etsy. If someone has added your shop as a favorite, it means they liked something about your presence enough that they wish to return. That’s great for a retailer to know.
On the forums now and then, you hear of people with problems viewing their hearts. I had a slower computer for most of last year and it took a long time to view mine. Worse, many serious sellers were unable to view their data at all, as lists of over 2000 or so don’t work very well with standard flash viewer.
I wanted a way to quickly total up my hearts, and see the latest people who added me. After learning about the api access structure from Etsy’s jobs page, I saw the possibility to create my own viewer for the data provided by that system. I was pleased to see that the data also included the time of day, which makes it even more useful to sellers.
UEN: How long did it take to create, and what was the hardest part?
Juln: It took about 3 weeks of work, probably in a large part due to the requirement for me to figure out what I was doing! The system has been in a functional state for the past 2 weeks or so, and during that time I’ve done a lot to fix and improve the code. I found one of the most challenging parts was writing the page numbering code, actually. Planning the flow of logic within the programs is interesting. Writing the program has actually been pretty straightforward, and it works, but the difficult part has been to determine the right way to do things.
UEN: What’s your background in developing? Do you do this for your “day job”?
Juln: My last programming experiences were with Logo and Basic on a Commodore 64, maybe Arexx and Shell scripts on the Amiga. I’ve also done a bit of php and mysql work prior to this, so I don’t have very extensive programming experience to say the least. I’ve used exclusively Linux on my computer for years, though, so I guess you could describe me as an avid computer hobbyist.
UEN: Are you working on any other cool Etsy-related tools?
Juln: I have ideas for all sorts of tools involving Etsy! I’ve been pondering program that let you import your favorites from Etsy, to sort and categorize them. Enhanced view tracking that works item by item is another project I’m thinking about. I’ve been considering adding more data analysis to the Heartomatic, such as stats about times of the day people added you, and how many in each month. I would really like to create a tool to speed the Etsy listing process, a la the Turbo Lister or Auctiva for eBay - a program like that could make listing a lot faster, allow you to schedule listings, duplicate listings, all sorts of things that would help me personally as a seller, in addition to many other people.
UEN: What new feature would you most like to see Etsy develop?
Juln: After this experience, I would have to say a documented, thorough public API would be the best. That would allow anyone knowledgable to create their own features and interfaces for Etsy. Lots of other sites, such as Flickr, Google, or Amazon have APIs that allow outside folks to access their databases and write programs to extract, send, sort, and display information. eBay has a ‘token’ system to manage logins for outside programmers to allow people to access their logged-in data, and a lot of what I am interested, like the listing tool or sold history analysis tools, would only be possible if users could access their private account data.
UEN: You are a glass artist and you have an Etsy shop. What is your favorite and least favorite part of making your art?
Juln: The glass is quite fun to work with, no doubt! Blowing glass for an occupation rather than for a hobby is a bit demanding, I suppose. I’d say I don’t like dealing with the physical hazards of glass work so much these days, such as eye radiation or the exposure to weird metals and glass dust. As far as the commerce end of things, I find creating good photographs of the glass is much more of a challenge than actually making the pieces! On the positive side, working with the color chemistry is the most interesting aspect. Borosilicate chemistry is complex and interesting, and the appearance of the glass can change in somewhat predictable but often unexpected ways. Seeing glass rods floop and melt, and change from black to silvery blue or from clear to bright purple is fascinating and magical. Probably my favorite aspect of creating glass beads is how it has brought me into contact with the fabulous community of jewelry designers and crafters on Etsy!
Thanks for inviting me to answer these questions, Jen!
And thank you for building the Heart-o-Matic, Juln!
