FA Almanac

Under the Instagram hood: reach, engagement and the image itself, landed in one place every Sunday.

Open Almanac Password-gated. Ask me for the guest login: finnastle@gmail.com

The Almanac dashboard: a grid of paintings, each tagged with its efficiency score, beside a What's Working panel reading Top Format Carousel, Best Motif #emergingartistplatform, Average Efficiency 3.3% — Fifteen posts, all months. The tiles are the paintings, not thumbnails of a chart.

I hate the Instagram dashboard

Checking how a post did means opening the app, which means the Reels feed, the suggested-for-you carousel, every trigger built to keep me there past the one thing I actually came to check. So I cut it out of my life entirely.

Almanac pulls the numbers instead and lands them in one place every Sunday. No unlocking required.

What it reads

Reach: How many accounts saw it. The only number that moves much.
Likes & comments: Straight off the Graph API, per post.
Saves & shares: Grouped as high-intent. Currently zero across the board, and left visible rather than hidden.
Efficiency: High-intent over reach, as a percentage. Ranks the grid.
Motifs: Hashtags pulled off each caption, grouped, scored by efficiency.
Format: Carousel against Reel, so the comparison is on the screen rather than in my head.

The Post Review panel: a photograph with drawn horses over it, its caption, and six metric tiles reading Reach 165, Saves 0, Shares 0, Likes 14, Comments 0, High-Intent 0 — One post, opened. The caption sits next to the numbers, and the row copies out as TSV or JSON.

How it gets there

A Cloudflare Worker wakes on a Sunday cron, asks the Instagram Graph API for every post, and writes the result two ways: into a Google Sheet through an Apps Script webhook, and straight back to this dashboard. Every month is kept, so it reads as history and comparison instead of a single stale export.

The Almanac login screen: the hand-brushed FA sun signature, ALMANAC in serif, Making & Metrics, and a single password field — The door. One password, no account, no email.

It works, annoyingly

It's honestly a little annoying how well it works: I built a tool to stop myself opening an app, and now I open the tool instead. Same behaviour, different app, nobody trying to sell me something in between.

Almanac just needs your own Meta Graph API key, pointed at a different account.

Say g'day