Our EZ API is by far the most popular method for tracking stats with StatHat. We recently deployed some changes that should make it more popular.

One main goal behind the EZ API is that you can track a stat while you are in the middle of writing code. You can insert one line of code including your email address as your API key and any stat name you want. There’s nothing to look up or form to fill out on the website. We used email addresses because they are easy to remember.

Many users are very happy with this system, but a few have commented that they aren’t crazy about having an email address be the user key for the EZ API.

Starting today, you can set your EZ API key to anything you want. You can leave it as your email address, change it to something easy to remember but a bit more obscure like “xXxOOOxXx”, or StatHat can generate a random string for you. You can change it at any time, as often as you like. (Use the Account interface to change your key…)

In order to make sure you don’t lose any data when you change your key, StatHat keeps track of your previous key as a backup and accepts data with your new key and your backup key. This gives you time to leisurely change the key in your code and deploy it without losing any data that is sent in to StatHat with your old key. You can delete the backup key at any time.

The HTTP API will accept “ezkey” as a parameter instead of “email”. We’ll be deploying changes to all the API libraries and documentation soon.