Calendar Heatmaps
Yesterday I was contemplating calendar heatmaps which are probably best known from the user interface of GitHub which relatively shows how active someone is on the website. I’ve discovered that JetPack for WordPress provides a similar functionality on the back end (in blue instead of green), but sadly doesn’t make it available for display on the front end of websites. I’ve filed a feature request to see if it’s something they’d work on in the future, so if having something like this seems useful to you, please click through and give the post a +1.
Circular Widthmaps
Today I saw a note that led me to the Internet Archive which I know has recently had a redesign. I’m not sure if the functionality I saw was part of this redesign, but it’s pretty awesome. I’m not sure quite what to call this sort of circular bar chart given what it does, but circular widthmap seems vaguely appropriate. Here’s a link to the archive.org page for my website that shows this cool UI, screencaptures of which also appear below: http://web.archive.org/web/sitemap/https://www.boffosocko.com/
Instead of using color gradations to indicate a relative number of posts, the UI is measuring things via width in ever increasing concentric circles. The innermost circle indicates the root domain and successive levels out add additional paths from my site. Because I’m using dated archive paths, there’s a level of circle by year (2019, 2018, 2017, etc.) then another level outside that by months (April 2019, March 2019, etc.), and finally the outermost circle which indicates individual posts. As a result, the width of a particular year or month indicates relatively how active that time frame was on my website (or at least how active Archive.org thinks it was based on its robot crawler.)
Of course the segments on the circles also measure things like categories and tags on my site as well along with the date based archives. Thus I can gauge how often I use particular categories for example.
I’ll also note that in the 2018 portion of the circle for July 11th, I had a post that slashdotted my website when it took off on Hacker News. That individual day is represented as really wide on that circular ring because it has an additional concentric circle outside of it that represents the hundreds of comment URL fragments for that post. So one must keep in mind that things in some of the internal rings aren’t as relative because they may be heavily affected by portions of content further out on the ring.
How awesome would it be if this were embed-able and usable on my own website?
User Interface to Indicate Posting Activity by Chris Aldrich (Boffo Socko)
I enjoyed the idea of these heatmaps and charting. I added the sparkline graph last week after I saw them on Chris’s website. I may create a separate web site page to keep these. I don’t know how useful they are, but they are just cool. I would also love a way to display some of the JetPack graphs.
These are the yearly JetPack stats from 2010, the year Automattic first offered the, to 2019.
2013 was the best year for this website.
But I get more “responses” that I did in earlier years. I suspect more of these are from semantic responses on other platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram since. It’s, and the time I started using some of the IndieWeb software.
Below is the Internet Archive graph for 2018, compared to 2012. Traffic has fallen off.
2013 Internet Archive Circular Widthmaps
2018 Internet Archive Circular Widthmaps
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<h2><span>Author:</span> Khürt Williams</h2>
Gen X-er near Princeton University in Montgomery Township, New Jersey, with a passion for aquariums, terrariums, technology, and photography. I love hiking in the woods, and my eclectic musical tastes span soca, Afrobeat, calypso, 1990s rap, grunge rock, and alternative genres. <a href="https://islandinthenet.com/author/khurtwilliams/" rel="author">
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