Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Category Archive Visualiser Thingy
Visualising data is so hot right now - see the Flickr tag page, or run your del.icio.us account through extisp.icio.us to see what I’m talking about - so I thought I’d knock up a Category Archive Visualiser Thingy for this site.
The page shows the number of entries in a category in a free-wheeling, groovy way that dispenses with the annoyance of actually having to read some numbers, instead displaying the number of posts in a category by changing the size and colour of the link pointing to each category’s page on the site.
Since I long ago gave up on the idea of developing a stylish taxonomy for the weblog, and am stuck with a small set of ridiculously broad categories, this was easy to do with a smidgin of PHP, the output of Movable Type’s <$MTArchiveCount$> template tag and a few CSS classes, but I might have a go at knocking up a clever version of the template that other people can easily use; one that can cope with lots of categories, that has a finer grain, to show more distinct visualisation of categories with a similar number of posts, and isn’t beholden to Movable Type’s alphabetical ordering of categories.
(Depressingly, the visualiser thingy’s rendering of the Site News category confirms Dave ‘Detroit’ Mottram’s oft-repeated assertion that this is largely a weblog about itself!)
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