the paulcash tracker

Site updates

2008-01-31T13:18:00.000-05:00

I've added a new donor and percent new donor graphs.
Don't take the % new donors one too seriously, since it's got a margin of error of 10-15% from the smoothing I do on the donation rates (which I'm too lazy to address at the moment), and it can be way off when the campaign bumps up the new donor count by some unexpected amount not corresponding to the donation rate (perhaps representing offline donors...)

break

2007-12-21T18:47:00.000-05:00

I'll be away until the 26th -- If something gets screwed up, it won't get fixed until then. So hopefully nothing breaks.

Tea Party 2007 - A Day for the record books

2007-12-17T02:28:00.000-05:00

The campaign's still crunching numbers, but it looks like they've raised $6 million.
I've put up an animated summary of the day here.

...$6 million!!!

12/21/07: number updated to the official press release total

The Flash widget

2007-12-16T16:11:00.000-05:00

I've received a few requests to take down the flash widget to conserver RP08's bandwidth.
Thing is, it's only 100KB that their server can spit out with no preprocessing. What's more, once a browser downloaded it, it'll stay in the cache, so it mostly won't get requested again.
Additionally, the widget checks a URL with some data on the RP server every 30 seconds or so. This data feed has an average response time of 150 ms, and isn't in any way measurably affecting the campaign servers.

What's slowing down RP08.com, in my estimation, is the direct visits and the processing involved with donations and credit card processing.

...but if someone from rp08.com asks me to take it off, it'll be gone immediately.

Tea Party '07

2007-12-16T01:51:00.000-05:00

~~$9.5 million~~, with about 75% confidence. That's my prediction at 1:50 AM.
I arrived at this number by comparing today's donation rate profile to November 5th -- they're quite close -- and assuming a linear relationship. (The 75% is a rough estimate of rate profile difference).

Update at 1:40PM, 4:30PM:
Donations didn't pick up as much as I had expected them at to 9AM, and the donation rate profiles are now fairly different (probably part because it's a Sunday, and because more people wanted to donate at the very start). The new estimate is going to be $6-7.5 million, with a ~~fairly low confidence of of 60%~~ confidence of 75%, though I'm 90% certain we'll raise over 5.5 million)

Status update

2007-12-15T00:23:00.000-05:00

I've reworked the averaging algorithm today -- it's more accurate overall, but it's more jittery. I'll fix this when I have time, as right now I'm a bit swamped with finals.

With that said, here's to 10 million!

Linkable graphs

2007-11-30T20:08:00.000-05:00

Hooray for small messageboard-friendly graphs!

Donations Collected

http://paulcash.slact.net/today-paulcash-small.png

Donation Rate

http://paulcash.slact.net/today-paulflow-small.png

Donor Rate

http://paulcash.slact.net/today-paulpeople-small.png

Donation Size

http://paulcash.slact.net/today-paulsize-small.png

Link to these all you want -- I have plenty of bandwidth to spare. These are tested and pretty much guaranteed to work and keep updating even through moneybombs.

Updates and Minibombs

2007-11-30T00:18:00.001-05:00

I apologize for not keeping this blog up to date. This will be remedied. Meanwhile, I'm watching today's moneybomb. Keep the money coming!

I've also added a small feature: you can now choose if you want to see the time period and the units for which you wish to see statistics.

Outliers

2007-11-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

I've tweaked the grapher to remove outliers -- numbers that are way inconsistent with the rest, such as the Nov 5th rates -- from the daily averages. I think this provides a much more useful view - the average line on the daily graph now represents "an average day" -- since November 5th was anything but average, and it could be misleading to compare the donation rates of a plain non-moneybomb day with the average of every day, moneybomb or not.
Let me know what you think.

Counting Change

2007-11-06T00:58:00.000-05:00

There isn't much I can say - the numbers speak for themselves.
39 thousand people gave Ron Paul $4 million. In 24 hours. Without a doubt, this is one for the record books. The White House suddenly seems not so far away...

I have put up a snapshot of the day, available here.

The Fifth of November

2007-11-05T02:06:00.001-05:00

It has begun. In the first 20 minutes after midnight, Ron Paul raised his daily haul of $65000. It's 2:07 now, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down too much.
The donor rate is about 1000 per hour now, so there'll be plenty left to donate throughout the day. I expect we'll see another big spike in the morning, and a large hump around 5, when people return from work.
Here's to hoping for $3 million with change -- with the present rate, this is going to be a new record, if it already isn't one.

Offline donations incorporated

2007-10-29T15:34:00.000-04:00

On Oct. 25th the Ron Paul campaign manually added $430k of offline donations to the flash widget without adding it to the database totals. I have finally added this information to the statistics and projections table, but I have left the graphs untouched.

For a while I didn't want to incorporate this into any graphs, because suddenly adding that large an amount would create a huge rate spike and throw all the averages out of whack. Even if I could manually correct for that (which I can), there would still be a huge, unexplained spike in the total donations graph.
Dan from ronpaulgraphs.com had added the spike to his graphs, and ended up removing it in the end, as it caused too much confusion. Instead of trying the same thing, I've opted to make use of the offline information only in the projection table.

Previous updates

2007-10-29T14:08:00.000-04:00

10/25/07 - Donor count is back!
10/20/07 - ronpaul2008.com stopped feeding number of donors. Half the graphs are now broken.
10/18/07 - Added exponential moving average predictions. That was an interesting one.
10/16/07 - Added daily averages.
10/15/07 - Daily graphs are now much, much neater.
10/13/07 - Added overlapping daily view

The blagging has begun

2007-10-29T14:05:00.000-04:00

A static site -- even if it isn't static at all -- is nothing without a blog these days. This, therefore, is a necessity.