Tesismometro

Tesismometro (Thesis-O-meter) is a project to keep track of your Thesis writing by computing daily statistics. It seeks several objectives:

• Track the number of words, pages, equations during the writing. Having a control of a quantitative work every day help to achieve the goals and milestones during this (sometimes tedious) process.
• Motivate the writing. Similar to other gamification techniques, seeing your progress regarding graphs and comparison between colleagues.
• Competitive with other members. It sounds a bit evil, but with (a healthy) competition with your colleagues checking who can advance faster and do progress.

It provides nice graphs and progress during your thesis, as well as a ranking with your colleagues.

What do I need?

Tesismometro is developed as a web application which stores the progress of the Ph.D. students. The application is meant to run with the Google AppEngine SDK, and a working version could be found in tesismometro.appspot.com/

Installation and local run

Assuming you want to try it you can run it locally, you would need:

• Python 2.7
• The Google AppEngine SDK (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs)
• A web browser. (who doesn't?)

Running locally

First, you clone the repository in the $INSTALLED_DIR. With the installed appengine run the following command line:

/usr/bin/python2.7 $APP_ENGINE_DIR/google_appengine/dev_appserver.py --host 127.0.0.1 $INSTALLED_DIR

Run a browser and open http://localhost:8000

That's all :)

Creating users

Luckily we have an admin interface which allows adding a user to the system. $SERVER/admin For production, it is required a Google ID (mainly a Gmail account) since the user authentication is done by this service. So a user is added with a name and the underlying email (ID).

I have a user I want to update my stats.

Well, this is kind of tricky. The user's interface shows how to upload (and update your data).

There is a bash script that does all the counting and updates it to the server (as explained in the user's area). But, you need

• A Linux/Unix terminal.
• texcount
• curl
• Your thesis in latex

If it is not the case, you can compute your stats (by hand or your script), and send a POST request to $SERVER/post, like

curl --data "name=$USER&words=$words&equations_inline=$inlines&equations=$equations&figures=$figures&cites=$cites&pages=$pages&token=$TOKEN"\
 $SERVER/post