In the previous design, I used the WP Simile Timeline plugin to show the timeline of the blog entries. This was a vertical timeline located in the left sidebar. The problem was that vertical timelines are pretty complicated to design and the simile timeline doesn’t really support a vertical layout. Therefore I chose to change to a horizontal blog timeline as part of the redesign. At the same time I realized that the timeline doesn’t fit to the overall design.

Hence I wrote my own timeline implementation using jQuery and embedded it in the new layout. Each small vertical tick in the header corresponds to a blog entry. If you hover over it, the link to the blog entry is shown.

Currently there are only few features:

1. RSS feed: the timeline implementation reads the RSS feed of the site an creates the div elements for the timeline.
2. Custom creation of events:  create a div and call a simple javascript method to add an event.
3. Design completely using CSS: it is very difficult to change the theme of the simile timeline. The timeline above can be adjusted using very simple CSS.

But of course, it still can (and needs) to be enhanced.

To be honest, I don’t think that this would be a good idea. On this page I use the Cumulus plugin by Roy Tanck. This plugin does a good job in visualizing the tags in your blog by distributing the tags on a 3D sphere. It’s easy to use, easy to understand – so if you are looking for some appealing visualisation of your tags, use this plugin and you’re done.

But why don’t I write a wordpress plugin for Hypergraph? First of all I currently don’t have the time . But apart of that, I don’t think it’s fit for purpose. Hypergraph, like other tools that show trees/graphs using hyperbolic geometry, is strong when there is some exponentially growing graph structure in the background. For example the organisational structure of a company or a class hierarchy are suitable.

However,  this is not the case for blogs: tags are used to loosely group blog entries which are somehow related, but even if we enforce a graph structure based on tags (which I don’t really propose), it won’t work. Of course one could link all entries with the same tag(s). Of course I haven’t conducted something like a field study to analyse a significant amount of blogs in the wild, but I assume that this will just create a lot of clutter, but won’t give additional meaning. Plugins like the mentioned Cumulus plugin circumvent this problem: they show the tags and not the articles, hence reducing the number of entities to show. They also don’t link the tags – even thought this would be some interesting challenge.

This leaves us with two open questions: Is it possible to cluster tags such that some similarity of tags can be established? If this can be done, would this give benefit to the visitor of a blog or another site?

Ideas and comments are of course most welcome.

trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

Since this can be called in any context, it allows you track something standard as downloads, but for example also whether your fancy drop down menu is actually used.

For details about this, see the documentation on google code or a tutorial. Actually the mentioned tutorial is from 2007 – at this time the functionality wasn’t available to all accounts. It should still be valid though.

Today I have installed a very first version of a complete relaunch of the old homepage of ‘Music for Oboe’ on Beauty of Code: the Haynes catalogue. ‘Music for Oboe’ is a quite complete listing of compositions for the oboe in the 18th century, which has been collected and published as a book by Bruce Haynes. Several years ago, this data has been made available on music for oboe using a simple Perl application by Peter Wuttke.

Since then, a lot of musicians all over the world contributed to this list, so that Peter and I decided to completely rewrite the application using Ruby on Rails. Well, actually I wrote the application while Peter checked lots and lots of libraries all over Europe to find new works or to validate the information given by others.

Needless to say, there are still a lot of things to do until the final version will go live.

But as I do some web development from time to time, I was at first a bit disappointed when I searched for some Safari plugins that support web development. I used some firefox plugins to analyze the DOM and CSS and I really wanted the same in Safari. There is a list of interesting plugins for Safari, but I wasn’t satisfied until I found the Web Inspector. Absolutely straightforward to use and really useful. Exactly what I was looking for.

Here a quick overview about the main features:

1. View the DOM hierarchy with folded nodes.
   This gives you a good overview about the structure and whenever you select a node, it is highlighted in the actual web site.
2. Analyze the CSS for each node.
   You can see the CSS as defined in the style-sheet but also the actually applied style, which combines browser defaults, inherited CSS and the explicitly defined CSS.
3. See all scripts, style-sheets, images or other media that is used for this page
4. And quite a lot more….

If you are interested in web design and you are using Safari, this is really a must.