Hey guys I made a thing (Updated 2014-10-18):

Tilde Club Link Visualizer

(Also see ~jr's work on the same notion!)

Paul's list of Tilde Club Connections made me think, "hey, this is neat, I wonder if I can play with it." Turns out, sure, and I had a Saturday with nothing else burning, so I found the perl and shell tools that Paul uses to build his list (all at github) and set about tinkering.

The network graph above depicts links between Tilde Club users. Scroll around the window, zoom in/out, refresh to see it go all bouncy again, and/or drag the nodes to see more or different parts of the thing. You can now also mouseover to see highlighted links to other nodes, which I think might be the coolest. For best effect, zoom in and then mouseover where you can see a little more detail.

Since putting it up a few days ago, I've continued to tinker with it to improve the display and the data itself. It was great fun to discover ~jr working on the same thing and chat about our mutual ideas and thoughts about improving it. One of the key improvements was to correctly capture and handle links built by ~gschueler's javascript tool. Happily, I've been able to modify the scraping code that Paul started with to be a little more grabby in order to pick up those links, too.

What does this all mean? Nothing, really. It's a cool picture that moves when you drag it around, and it shows a view of some of the relationships that we make here. It doesn't tell us much about depth, or intent, and certainly not importance. For me it's a fun way to practice building something, learn a bit along the way, and now that it's built, to discover what's out there among Tilde Clubbers. It has made me happy to play with it, and gratified that a few people have told me it's cool.

I'd love to hear what you think! If you like it, let me know, because we all love using mutt around here.

Some technical detail

• I re-use the core of Paul's scaper to create a list of source and target links here at Club Tilde. I've modified it to include all words beginning with ~, and then validate that list against the contents of /home to clean out those things that aren't links to local users' ~ pages. (In working on this I learned that there were a fair amount of ~ pages that aren't on Tilde Club at all!)
• I store that list as JSON, with a set of nodes that define all the users, and then a set of links that describe the relationships. I've improved the code here so that I don't have to clean up the JSON any longer. (Yay!).
• However, the occasional bad link or weird username shows up that tends to break the D3.js display. I keep a manual list of exclusions to handle these, but in case any new ones pop up I don't currently publish updated JSON data automatically.
• I use D3.js to build pictures of it right in your very own browser window. Everything I know about using D3 I cribbed from mbostock's examples.
• Also excluded when I build the JSON are a few outbound-link-heavy pages here at the club that are basically indexes of one kind or another: These collectors tend to swamp the visualization because they link to literally every users's index page. (I left in the link to ~harper's web ring because it's neat to see how many people link to it. I'm totally arbitrary that way. Feedback welcome on things to include or exclude to make prettier or more interesting pictures.)
• Interested in the data? Here it is.

More stuff to do with this might include:

• I'd like to add directional arrows to make relationships clearer
• links to ~ pages from the images (meanwhile you could use my Alfred doodad to somewhat easily nav to names that interest you)

From here you could go back to my home page. Elsewhere it is pitch black; steam pipes, grues, etc.