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.

While I can’t say much about the medical relevance, this work gives rise to an interesting visualisation. Shown is a set of diseases which are related to each other by there genetic similarity. Each disease is represented by a circle with a size proportional to the number of genes involved.

The general idea is to identify overlapping events and then redefine the height of the timeline accordingly. Though I don’t think it’s very useful as it leads to very high timelines, I wonder to what extent this idea could be used to resolve a big issue with the vertical timeline which I use for the blog archive on this blog. If there are two events very close to each other in a vertical timeline, they will automatically overlap.

Potentially this could be resolved by combining hot zones (which currently need to be defined explicitly) with his idea of automatically adjusting the height of the timeline. The Timeline code would check whether two events overlap and add a hot zone for the area of the events.

Two problems would remain:

1. Events which occur at the same time or so close that the hot zone would cover a very short time (minutes or so).
   This could be handled by a kind of summary event that basically says: here are two (or more events) at the same time, click for details. 
2. Duration events.

I don’t know yet how to get this resolved in detail, but I’ll try it sometime.

The basic idea is to have a program on one single page / in one single graphic, which shows the overall structure and density of the program part you are looking at. Bradford Pailey adds an overlay that shows the actual execution path on top of the code.

I wonder whether this idea, which is currently art rather than a programming tool,  can actually be implemented as part of an IDE plugin (I’m thinking of Eclipse as I’m working with Eclipse 99% of my time). 

The code is of course already available in any IDE and profiling data could be obtained from the Eclipse Test and Performance Platform or other profiling tools.

However, it’s not yet clear to me how the interaction between the different classes and packages can be covered. The graphic by Bradford Pailey shows a program that consists of one file only – at least that’s what it looks like.