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Forthcoming improvements to the Ruminator
Sunday, August 03 2008
I have been experimenting with graphing Ruminator data, so that one can see trends a la the Google Zeitgeist.
On Friday Matt At Work sent around a link to a nice Canvas-based graph widget, and this was the kick in the arse I needed to get going. I have visions of being able to graph word counts over time, but also to make any given day’s data available as a histogram, and so on.
There are some real UI challenges here. Not every word you can think of appears in the news, but my corpus already has about 40,000 words in it, and there are only going to be more in future. Lookup lists are out of the question. Finally, a use case where AJAX is really justified—I’ve long admired Zoomin’s search box, and it looks like just the ticket for this kind of situation.
I’m still only part way through, because I have the dreaded lurgy and my energy levels for weekend hacking are low. However I have also discovered the Ajax Autocompleter widget from Scriptaculous, and got that working. I hope to have a page people can play with soon.
Tags: the ruminator ~ ajax ~ graphs
Rendered at 2010-08-01 22:18:32