 we're back from our 30 minute break. We kept Tom Woodward here, we didn't let him leave. And we're here to talk the title, which is a little bit, I mean, honestly, it's kind of a great title, but I hope you can live up to it, aspirational and operational data collection for the minute ones up. So we're kind of here to talk about, you know, a lot of people come and or we'll ask us questions that reclaim about like, that's and metrics and what's possible. And the answer is sort of, well, you know, what do you want? There's a lot of things that are possible and to collect. But I think the first question is what do we need? What answers are we trying, you know, to come up with? What questions are we trying to answer? And what, you know, what questions can answer the question? Wow, that's terrible. But what can lead you to answer the question of what's a successful domain ones own program, right? And some of this that we want to eventually kind of help roll in for all domain of one's own schools to have access to. But I think the first step to having more stats available for our schools is to think through what we even need as a community. So that's why we have Tom here to kind of help us think this through and definitely also going to encourage participation in the chat, especially for this session, to as we kind of work through this workshop a little bit. So my understanding is Tom, you had done a little bit of work with kind of helping schools position this stuff. And you can probably share a little bit of what you were thinking through as your how to visualize information about domains and WordPress in general. Right. And I've got a, yeah, so I've got an example. And I'll tell you the situation so that maybe it helps contextualize it. Because I think it's too easy to make this, or at least my kneejerk reaction is always like, I don't want to count that because that doesn't matter. But what I have to keep reminding myself is like, what's the administrative conversation I need to have with particular people and what's likely to sway them. And do I really care if they understand these grander thematic things or not? And how do I make something kind of practical that's going to influence people who are not outright enemies, but people who have very little time and interest in paying attention to this. And so it usually comes down to money. Can I show that we're saving money? Can I make charts that go up? That was a was a departmental comment always, can we make this chart go up in deeper angles? And then can we tie it into other big things at the university that they're supposed to care about strategically. And so what you see right here is one of the demo things we did for rampages where we try to break it down. Big picture, what's happening on this site? What do we support? What do we care about? How do we make this kind of feel exciting and interesting? And you can kind of see what we're doing here where we got numbers. We got a chart. It definitely goes up. Like, does it really matter how many sites users we have on rampages? It doesn't, except for it kind of makes it harder to manage. But it looks impressive, right? We have big numbers and we made them big. We give a little bit of rationale here if we ever think that we're going to get to people. I always figure people are going to scan a thing and we're lucky if they notice the giant stuff. But I'm going to include some of the details where I try and say, why in the world are we doing this? Oh, why WordPress runs 30% of the internet. These are career-ready skills. And we use some of that conversation earlier. And then I take advantage of when a portfolio group comes in and says they'll charge X amount per student. And I say, we can do that in rampages. That's my new metric for how much money we're saving the universe. And I can say other things like, and it doesn't go away in rampages case. And we have this kind of storage versus what they would charge there. And you see, we're just kind of repeating that real world customizable portable. We're associated with this many programs. So if you made this go away, this many people would be mad at you because you're messing up what's going on. And we just kind of keep trying to repeat that. How do we kind of show bold highlights? How do we get into a little more detail? Whenever I can show money, I do it. When I can associate us with grants, I do it. I try and show some of the stuff I care about personally that I think is interesting and good. And I'm trying to think through like how it will work. And you can see this was not a finished thing. Like we have some crappy stuff where like the letters are overflowing. But it was meant to show to our, you know, fifth or sixth leadership change since I had gotten there to try and show them what in the world does this group do? And how do we show it's good? And, you know, we did a similar thing with each object. You can see that with OER materials here where we broke it down and we went back to money. You know, we tried to show the more sophisticated things we were doing so that it would attack, I guess, arguments across the board for different people. But I'm trying to keep it practical while still showing some of the aspirational stuff and then thinking through always with my audience. What do they care about? What do I care about? How do I reach some sort of middle ground? Awesome. So I think this kind of makes me think as you're describing this that I feel like one step might be here. I think we know that there are certain statistics like, okay, we know how to count how many sites or accounts exist in WordPress multi-site or domain of one's own. And you can look at things like bandwidth, which is, I don't know, I don't think that's maybe that useful for telling a story of Domain's program to someone who doesn't already know what that would mean. But I think what I want to kind of make a mention of here before we kind of continue is I'm going to make a thread in Discord. And I'd like if admins throughout the day want to throw in stats that they want to know or questions that they want to answer. Not that all of those are things maybe that we have access to right now, but I'm going to use that like me, Taylor, as like a list of a wish list, essentially, of things that we can look at to help kind of people tell that domain of one's own story or WordPress multi-site story, whichever. And I think what you start to balance too is what can we pull automatically so that we're not doing it by hand? And then what do we need to capture anecdotally that's kind of worth that investment and how do we kind of keep these workflows manageable? That's the piece there that hasn't been completed like on the VCU example. And the thing I hope to do this summer with Middlebury's domain of one's own because you can start to see like what do we say this thing does? In Middlebury's case, we're saying like explore, connect, experiment, create a digital identity, take it with them. These are things like that I would like to be able to prove that we're really doing. And how do I do that? How do I show that someone experimented? And that gets to like the automation of data as well as what data can we get a hold of? But I mean, one of the things I did early on when I got to Middlebury is just look at all the different domain of one's own home pages and see what people were saying this thing did for them and to see if they were proving it in any way, which is an interesting way to kind of explore stuff. So I just made that thread that I was talking about. So like I said, as people think of that stuff either in this session or elsewhere, I'd love to have people mention that in the Discord thread. So John asks, what would this look like? Would all users on domain of one's own server have access to gravity forms for their WordPress sites? Or to be just through the home site? Well, technically, we do actually have the ability to, if we give gravity forms to a home site, you can use that on other sites. So that would be available elsewhere. And you just work with us to get that license set up essentially. So yeah, you would have access to that. And I was looking in the bed, so in bed, so John Stewart was asking that about an earlier thing, which makes more sense. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. The thing I find interesting here is like, you see people put in huge amounts of work, what I'll call herculean effort into doing this stuff, and the stuff is awesome. I think the OU Creates is a good example of that, but what's hard is keeping that going for a long amount of time. So just trying to decide here like, what do you have the people to do? What do you have the workflows to do? How simple can you make some of this stuff happen for yourselves? Like, how do you kind of bake it into your day to day little existence so that you're building up the kind of anecdotal stuff, the kind of data that you need? It gets a little bit into what Jim asked about. Like, when people register, can we get more information about them? So then we could say, 347 students, 122 faculty members, we could say stuff like that a lot easier if we collect that data on the registration path, and then we could build it into the display, and it could happen automatically, an update. Like, no reason for me to hand-do the number of WordPress sites on rampages. Sure. That's impressable, right? Like, and it's you just thinking through those pieces so that this template becomes a thing that you can kind of update the anecdotes, but like the other stuff becomes a little more hard-coded in and just kind of runs its own business. Yeah. Well, and some of what you mentioned, like updating your anecdotes makes me kind of think of like, I mentioned stats and metrics, but I will say when I was an admin, I cared way more about that anecdotal stuff and the qualitative, I don't know if I would call it data because it is really anecdotes, but I always felt like that was much more descriptive for, you know, when I was talking about domains to people who didn't know what it was, is say, this person was able to do this with it, and they couldn't have done that with another tool because X, Y, and Z, or it allowed them to take it with them when they left, all that kind of stuff, right? And so I was kind of wondering in, you know, obviously you can't necessarily like automatically collect anecdotes, or if you did, it probably wouldn't be very useful, right? But kind of thinking of that from a process perspective, and when I was an admin, I didn't really have a process, it was just, I think I had a Google doc, and I made notes of things, but I always had kind of ambitions to make that a more regular thing and say like, well, maybe I should be emailing, you know, groups of users on a more regular basis, or even looking into like scheduling emails a year after you sign up and say, hey, how's it going? Have you done anything with this? If you haven't come in and get help, but if you have, we'd love for you to share it because it was shown in an earlier session, but like at S&C for night domains, we had the community site template, and that's available for anyone to use is a template like that. But that's no good the day they sign up, right? Like no one really wants to share the site the first day they register, they probably want the site, or they probably want to share the site when there's something there. So that was one thing I never really made a good process, but I would be, I'd love to hear from folks if they have things that they liked to do. Yeah, I was going to say here, just kind of watching the Discord conversation happen while you all are chatting, Anika asked, is there a way to tell logins slash edits to the WordPress instances on each site? For us, once someone downloads WordPress, rarely will they log back into the C panel. So they're logging in directly to the application and sort of bypassing single sign-on. Yeah, so that is not necessarily straightforward to find out on Domain of One's Own, but we actually are going to talk a little bit of tools like that later on today. The new tools for deprovisioning, John Stewart did something in that line, and he's going to talk a little bit about how he did that, but as of right now, unless I'm not remembering correctly, Lauren, I don't think there's a place right now that you can go and find that, unlike a pulled-back server-wide level. Yeah, Reclaim has to balance how much information we're tracking, you know, just for security purposes, and I think just relationships that we have with universities and colleges, so there's only so much that we are, you know, we have permission to track. We can look at single sign-on timestamps. So usually when we talk about site archiving and deprovisioning, for example, we're saying, you know, in order for us to see that you're in here, we need you to log in with single sign-on. So just if you want to keep your site, just log in and authenticate with single sign-on. We'll capture that, and that's kind of, you know, one of the ways that you can define usage over time, but it is tricky. Audrey Park asked, or you know, just on that wish list said, streamlined way for us to generate on our end a copy slash pasteable list of installed plugins and themes, including information like version number that is installed, so it can be referenced when updating for multi-site. That would be super helpful. Yeah, well, and for multi-site, everyone has access to the same set of plugins and themes, but knowing which ones are actually enabled on a site-by-site basis would be cool, for sure. There are some plugins that will do that, depending on the scale of your multi-site, you know, it will cause some performance hits or stop functioning at a certain level, but those things are out there. I don't remember the name off the top of my head because it broke for us, but you can do custom things with that, particularly on a multi-site. So, you know, that's a lot more controllable and understandable within a simple multi-site as opposed to across the domain. Yeah, I will say some of, and I'm definitely speaking prematurely in terms of what is my investigation. I'm just kind of starting to dig into this, but there is quite a bit if the WordPress sites are in Installatron that you can query via the Installatron API, none of which I can, like, demonstrate yet because I'm still kind of wrapping my head around it, but plugins and themes is one of the things that I am looking into of, like, can we know? Because Installatron can tell you certain things about sites, and I don't know if plugins and themes are possible in that, but that is on my list as of now, because it's in the Discord thread of can we find that out? So, Mo mentioned on the scale of, like, an individual user, how do folks provide site analytics to the user, you know, number of visits, hits, things like that? Do people use metrics module on cPanel? And Tom, if you want to reply to that? Yeah, just, you know, it gets into, like, what's your ethics about the stuff? Like, are you comfortable giving it through Jetpack or Google Analytics? Around the GDPR stuff, we got kind of twitchy and just weren't big fans of giving that data to those people anyway, so we installed Matamo, which is kind of an open source Google Analytics that you can customize in a couple ways to make the data a little less creepy, maybe? Maybe a little less useful, but also you have a lot more control over it, you can expire it, you can do all sorts of things, and so we provide options that way, and you can do that within a single multi-site, you can do it as an external application. You can think, I think you can run it through just a single WordPress regular install as well, so. Yeah, Matamo is awesome and is a pretty direct replacement for Google Analytics. Like, it does a lot of the same types of data in, like, it can give you, like, behavior flows and what pages clicked on after what. I'm not, like, I haven't dug that far into that stuff, but I know that that's there. I will say in my experience for, like, an individual user, like, if you have a faculty member that's like, is anyone looking at my site? I actually do like to point them to the cPanel stuff for that because it's just built in and there, and they probably only want to kind of know relative traffic, and that's kind of how I was explained to people is, like, look, none of these statistics, including Google Analytics, is not perfect, right? If you run an ad blocker, it's probably not running. You're probably not picking up that traffic on Google Analytics. I don't know about Matamo. That's a little bit different because it's hosted on a different, in a different place. But so I always like to explain to people that, like, all of this stuff is kind of useful in a relative sense. Like, you can compare Google Analytics traffic against other Google Analytics traffic, and that may be helpful for you. And you may want to know some general trends and, like, what page is more popular. And so if your needs are very simple and basic, I think what's built in the cPanel with the AW stats is pretty good, actually, for just getting started. And then, yeah, if as you need more things or you want more detailed, like, behavior reporting and refer tracking and stuff like that, Matamo, I think is pretty good. So we've got a couple minutes left here. Looks like about two or three minutes. Yeah, I guess maybe with those last few minutes, Taylor, I know you created that Discord thread on your wish list. What would be on your wish list? My wish list? Yeah. This is a complicated one, so, like, don't expect me to make this available immediately. But I'm actually much more interested in the lifecycle of a site. Like, I want to know how much disk usage one month into an account's life, and a year and two years, and like, and so on. Because I think that's, yeah, I think the growth in disk usage is by no means a perfect way to track that. But I think that could be one way to have an idea of like, okay, clearly someone's doing stuff with this. The other big one for me, and this is just available, like, you don't have to do anything fancy, you can just find this out in installtron is I'm always curious to see the second application people install, like, to me, a big part of domains is seeing, like, students that would make WordPress install for a class, and then seeing them move it to a subdomain later and put a main one on or whatever, you know, what's the second thing they do with their site, because to me, that was a cool indication of like, oh, they're getting what the tools are, what's possible with the tools, they're conceptualizing that this is an account and multiple things can live in it, and I have control over what that's laid out. So I always like to see the multiple installs in certain cases, or even just like categories on WordPress sites, although that would be harder to track. In the last two minutes here, M has a question for you all, aside from the statistics, how are you organizing this kind of information that is tracked? For example, as admins, we like to track account info, what users own, version of applications, that is something only we want to see not necessarily for the public, just want to know best practice for storage of data. Yeah, so organizing it in terms, well, I will say there are, you know, you can check the installtron page in WHM to get that type of information, but as far as organizing it and storing it, you know, one thing that I personally would take reports like that and save them periodically to a different place, so I had old versions of the reports to compare against, but you know, it would be possible, it's not really easy for us to do is like a default, but it would be possible to archive reports right on the server and just keep like here's a 30-day one and stuff like that. That actually gets a little bit complicated pretty quickly, so that's why we don't do it out of the box that way, depending on what people want, but you know, that I think would be a decent way is kind of taking some of those and just making sure you have a few versions around to compare against. It's probably a good place to stop for now, but thank you all so much for writing in the Discord chat and I'm excited to see that that thread continue to grow and we'll respond to additional questions that come in there as well. For now, we're going to go ahead and close and prep for the next session, which we'll start in a couple minutes. Thank you all so much. See you then. Thanks, Tom.