eHow writer 17of26 recently developed a new application that helps eHow writers keep track of their eHow earnings.     170f26 is the screen name of Chris Smith, a 37 year old software developer whose eHow articles usually focus on computer and technical niches.    I had the opportunity to interview Chris about his new eHow Earnings Tracker application:

How long have you been writing for eHow?

Technically speaking, since October 2008.  However, I only wrote two articles and then proceeded to get distracted by other things.  I returned to eHow in late April of 2009 and have written 27 articles since then.

How many articles have you written?

29

At what point did you see a need for the eHow Earnings Tracker application?  (Was it at a certain number of articles, or at a certain threshold of eHow income?)

The need for the tracker was obvious to me as soon as I had a handful of articles that were earning some money.  There is no visual indicator for which articles earn money on a given day and there’s no history of article earnings on a day to day basis.  Once I got to 15 or 20 articles, it became difficult to figure out which articles had earned money since the last earnings update.

Before you developed the earnings tracker, how did you keep track of your earnings?

I used a Firefox addon called TableTools to manually copy the article earnings data into Excel every day.  This technique got tedious very quickly since the eHow articles page only shows you 10 articles at a time and I had to manually collate each day’s data with what I had gathered previously.

Can you tell us how the tracker works, and how it can help eHow writers?

Using the tracker is easy -

After the tracker is installed, the user navigates to their article  library in the browser (the “Articles” tab under “My Profile”).  Then  they can click on Tools, then eHow Earnings Tracker, then Update  Earnings.  The tracker will automatically navigate the article library  collecting the current statistics for all of their articles.

When it’s done, the user will get an HTML page of statistics.  The  tracker keeps a history of the statistics that it has collected and  will show all of the data in a grid where the articles are listed in  rows and a column is added for each day that the tracker was run.  The  tracker will highlight changes in article earnings as well as article  additions and deletions.  This lets the user quickly and easily see  what is going on with their articles.

Did you beta test the earnings tracker?

Yes.  I released the initial version of 0.1.1 on July 8th, 2009.  A handful of fellow eHow writers helped me test it over the next 4 days while I enhanced it and fixed bugs that they found.  On July 13th I felt that the tracker was stable enough to be released to the general eHow community.  Version 0.3.0 was released and it has no known bugs at this time.

Are there any special requirements to use the eHow tracker, or can anyone use it?

The tracker is implemented as a Firefox addon and requires Firefox 3.5 to use.

Is there anything else you’d like eHow writers to know about the earnings tracker and/or future plans for the application?

The tracker is a fairly simple application, so I don’t think there’s much more to know .

As far as the future, right now the only plans I have are to add sortable columns and daily totals to the HTML report and to add the ability to export the earnings data into CSV or tab delimited formats for easy importing into spreadsheet programs.

There have already been requests for both IE and Google Chrome versions of the tracker.  I may or may not do these – it depends on how well received the tracker is and how much demand there is for other versions.  I also have other software projects that I want to do that are competing for my time .
You can learn more about (and download) the eHow Earnings Tracker from Chris Smith’s website.   While you’re at his site, please take note of the “donate” button in the upper-right corner, akin to a tip glass on a pianist’s piano.  Chris has spent time and energy to develop this software for all eHow users… consider showing your appreciation by giving a donation for his efforts.