Show HN: EasyCSV, stop generating CSVs for non-tech colleagues (an MVP)

by benofsky • 13 years ago

10 9 13 years ago

t0• 13 years ago

What is it? Your site gives almost no indication. Are we talking comma separated files?

benofsky4• 13 years ago

I'm often asked to generate CSVs of our user base for various non-technical colleagues. They might use these CSVs to do analyses in Excel or import users into a service (like Mailchimp).

This is an attempt at taking me out of that process, and automating it.

darkstar999• 13 years ago

No Terms of Use or Privacy Policy?

benofsky4• 13 years ago

Yup, my bad. Terms of use I don't think we need right now. Privacy policy is: we'll never share your data with anyone.

dcraw• 13 years ago

Your javascript snippet seems to point to http://easycsv.dev/. I'm guessing you'll want to replace that.

I was also confused about what CSVs I was supposed to create. It's not clear that you're generating CSVs of user data.

benofsky4• 13 years ago

Eek! Fixed.

Thanks for the feedback — we'll see if we can make that clearer.

mvkel• 13 years ago

You really need to do a better job explaining this. I know how CSVs work, but I don't know this could help me.

What is "your users" in this context?

benofsky4• 13 years ago

Yup. We're working on making this clearer right now.

"Your users" is _your_ users. You add a Javascript snippet to your app which sends us up-to-date information about your users (as they move around your app) — we record that data and allow you (or a colleague) to download a CSV of the data at any time.

Does that make sense?

jack-r-abbit• 13 years ago

In addition to adding the JS include for your script, we need to call a series of EasyCSV.user functions to identify the user currently viewing that page and set the data we want to store about that user for that page. But all that data we'd need to pump out into the JS calls is already coming from somewhere... a DB I would assume. For me, that seems like a bit too much overhead for such a simple task. Since all the user data is in the DB already anyway, when we want a CSV of our users, we do DB export. Unless I am missing something, I don't see this being very useful myself. But if it helps you, then it might help someone else.

Show HN: EasyCSV, stop generating CSVs for non-tech colleagues (an MVP)

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