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!)

Posted at 1pm on 24/11/04 by Jack Mottram to the site news category.
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