A nice cup of rabies

Aww, I'm a stalker. *snf*

I don't think CSS positioning is the right way to go about displaying this data, but only because I can't think what use the plain text would be. It'd just be really messy list in a speechreader, and reveal no meaning. Besides, I wonder if, with all that CSS, you'd really end up with a smaller file — but you said the same yourself :)

Time to write up my mindmap, I guess!

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wolfwings.livejournal.com

But if you 'built' the CSS on the fly from JavaScript, you could effectively store the raw data and vector-linkages and render those client-side, including the interlinking lines and boxes around names.

That would be more portable (client-side, various resolutions, special forms of anti-aliasing, print res, etc) than the .GIF's, for what really is just some simple vector-based stuff. And technically it could be kept 'hearable' by text-to-speech programs then as well.

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If it's vector-based stuff, it should be done in a vector-based format, not in javascript! Aiee. Bring on the Flash, or SVG, if you want to be idealistic. LJ won't show Flash though, which is the real reason why these are GIFs, I suspect.

Besides, I'd be really curious as to how one would go about drawing lines with CSS, even with the help of Javascript DOM scripting. :)

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wolfwings.livejournal.com

...I'll provide the browser-abusing link showing vector-animation done in pure CSS abuse. Right here (http://www.infimum.dk/HTML/rotatingStar.html) in fact.

The actual trick is quite mundane, but still fairly interesting to see pulled off. :-)

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This is, however, somewhere in the realm of an Ugly Hack. n.n

And I shudder to imagine how many div's were abused in the course of that demo.

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That's ... sick. :)

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Less bandwidth - nothing to serve! (The gif is hosted on the guy's machine.)

Although I realized the deluxe color version (which you can get if you paypal him a few bucks for bandwidth) isn't just plain text; color's one thing, but it also draws lines between the names.

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The lines are pretty pointless to be honest, since you can't make them out easily, or follow them. The best reason to pay is that you only wait a couple of days instead of 3 weeks :)

I see your point about the cut in bandwidth, yeah - it hadn't crossed my mind, even though it's pretty obvious. I usually think in terms of download-time for the user rather than load on the server. As soon as you spread across onto more than one server, the two way relationship breaks down.

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As someone who relies on an acquaintence's kindness for her bandwidth, and knows it's getting paid for out of a personal pocket, not corporate coffers, I think as much about server load as download time!

The lines reveal a little something but not much. In a graph this tight, the ones I've seen with lines and color just have a huge snarl of lines around the central name; you can really only see anything around the fringe.

Inline SVG, as discussed above, probably would be the best solution all around (Flash is cryptic to build, and lives on the server), if not for the fact that, um, there's no damn browser support to speak of. Aren't standards great?

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Don't talk to me about standards. I'm having to make a standards-compliant site that works on Netscape 4. I want to kill things. :P

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*hug* I can only imagine your pain. Getting something to be standards-compliant and work on the modern browsers is hard enough. I wonder how it got embedded in corporate minds that "everything must work on NS4"... by this time, the temptation to just make sure it's legible, if unpretty, without CSS and just hide it all from NS4 must be pretty strong.

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Yeah, we usually just filter the CSS so NS 4 doesn't see it, but this client has a bizarrely large percentage of NS 4 users (around 7-10%) so we can't ignore them. *mutter* Ah well, back to the soul-destroyance!

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radiofreecatgrl.livejournal.com

You are surrounded, User Peganthyrus. Please surrender immediately.

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Yea, I was kinda noticing that. It's like a sign, telling me to... to do something involving latex, at least.

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immortalpain.livejournal.com

Thats really.. er... strange. I tried it myself and got a list (er, random smattering?) of people I have never even heard of. <3

What an odd meme. :

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vickshb.livejournal.com

I tried that too. I got my friends' friends listed on it. O.o

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BEHOLD! COLOR! DO NOT DARETH MOCK THE AWESOMENESS OF COLOR AND THOSE GOOFY LINES BEHIND IT! BOW TO COLOR! COLOR RULEZZZ!!!!

Once your stunned silence passes, I have another zinger for you: Perhaps it's my lj-cut design, but bandwidth really isn't the problem I thought it would be. True, I use a host. If I used DSL, I think I'd have a problem. Not a huge one, but a problem. Especially during peak hours. But how big is a 500x500px black-and-white gif? Twenty kilobytes? My modem squirts that in one second.

I use like 500megs of bandwidth a day or something. I pay like $8/mo to web-host-plus.com.

My color maps are larger, of course... some are 100k. But realize that with my lj-cut design, the friends pages only get served up 5k or so.

I think my record for one day was like 30,000 hits to 7,000 unique IP's. I get this almost every day when my back-end is humming smoothly. I have a computational bottleneck that prevents me from producing more than a hundred or two per day, and that limits my release rate. So I'm working on a new approach that could accelerate that. That'll be neat.

I think LJ throws out CSS and JavaScript in any case. I've seen cool things done with JavaScript (even moving graphics similar to my product), but what a hassle. What you have here with gif is a widely distributed format, 500x500 means it fits on almost every computer, on almost every browser in the world. And it means I can animate the sucker. Won't that rule?

People have done work similar to mine, but once you require a certain browser or platform, nobody's gonna see it.

You'll notice, too, the large HTML chunk I bundle. This I want to develop. See, the original versions had the city name when you hover over someone. I want to bring that back. For now, it just goes to some lj's, and the boxed items go to other mindmaps. My goal is to give a rich experience (with the locations), and a perception of real-bigness (with the portals). If I just had a faster program, or a faster computer, I wouldn't be 3,000 orders behind. Oh, wait, 3,260. It goes up about a hundred a day. Try to appreciate the vastness of LJ. Just try.

PAY NO MIND TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

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Oooh, thank you, sir! I can only presume this is my reward for giving you interesting things to think about.

My experience with bandwidth has usually been in the context of "Oh shit, our site just got posted somewhere big, we're running out of bandwidth". I presumed that any popular-on-LJ meme (do you have a DJ/etc version in the back of your head, or is LJ more than enough?) would eat up a lot of bandwidth, which is why I edited the HTML to take out the pre-cut teaser image.

Javascript gets tossed, yes, but CSS stays - I've done a little experimentation with it here and there. You have to do it all as inline styles (<span style="text-decoration:blink">blinky text</span> to get blinky text, for instance), but it's quite doable. I could see doing <a style="font-size:110%; top:13px; left:17px; color:#aa8803" href=http://something>username</a> or something like that for the layout and size and chroma, but the lines are pretty much impossible to gracefully do via CSS. And yeah, hard to animate!

And there is the browser issue. I'd played with this sort of thing before, back when LJ still generated the 'dot' files for inputting into that graphing package. And I put my results up as an SVG because I'm a vector art obsessive. I'd also tried a Java-based friendslist browser that simply refused to work under OSX. Very frustrating.

I don't quite know why mapping these relationships is so fascinating. Perhaps because we're just social animals. I mean, discovering that I got colored greenish in this, with my name sandwiched between three friends of mine who're room-mates, and an alternate journal of one of them, certainly tells me something about my relationship to them!

(which makes me wonder - is the relationship solely based on the people in my friends list, or does everyone but me being friended to someone else alter their location, or several of us being members of the same lj community affect grouping? Look at the greenish, large-named people here, for instance, then check the membership of

tekalalmuck out. Is this )

I've been experimenting with CSS lately, so it's easy to say 'Hey! This looks like a job for CSS!'. But the bandwidth requirement's a lot less than I thought. Send-once instead of send-many-times is attractive, though. As well as being able to zoom it with nothing more than the browser's text size controls, if the positioning's done right.

I noticed that some people have the city name in the HTML; some boxes go to another mindmap on your machine, others go to an LJ page - sometimes one with a mindmap embedded, sometimes one that's now locked. Residue of evolving and changing desires in the code, I presume?

This is the sort of thing that, IMHO, Livejournal should possibly be finding and hosting. Every company needs a research arm as well as an engineering arm, and the friends relationship is a lot of what distinguishes LJ from other blog services.

The several variables you have going at once definitely say something more than just location and lines - finding two exes in tiny type, and in colors counter to the one I come up in, is certainly telling me something about how my relationship with them has changed over time, or how it was in the first place...

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Do you have a dj? i'd go there.

you know your css.

what were the "dot" files?

people like seeing their own name. i love to see my name.

i think i rarely show people things they didn't know already, or have the power to know. i'm a magician because i play with your perceptions. i seem to know things only you knew, or unknowable things. and i smile, and wave my hands, ta da. But how could that be?

communities aren't involved. it's all based on friend lists. if you aren't friended with X, X isn't on your map. The MindMap is personal, individualized, and that's part of the magical appeal. You are the center of its world.

I send the HTML once. LJ is kind enough to store that for me. Really it is like 7k.

I'm pleased you noticed the subtlties. HTML, once deployed, is out of my hands. And I let little errors persist a while now and then. So there are deployed quirks.

I think LJ will unseat me if I don't keep evolving. Brad is interested and Evan is researching. I have to keep my niche against these code animals.

That you infer wisdom from the colors... in many dimensions, in many media, I accepted imperfect and subtle techniques, hoping through enough axes, through enough forms, i approximate out to uncanny meaning, or the illusion of it.

Thanks for the feedback and ideas. Please bring more soon.

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No DJ for me, but I know a lot of LJ-based tools have DJ versions, as well, since it's the same underlying code.

I'm no CSS goddess, not by a long shot. I'm just a dabbler. Though I know enough now that a secondary special-purpose journal of mine almost always uses lots of CSS for strange visual layout play.

"dot" files are the input format of graphviz; LJ used to make the friends relationships of a user available in that format, but it's gone now. The images I pointed to from a looong way back were done with graphviz.

My point in suggesting an all-CSS was mostly that, yes, you do only send it once. So if it's several k, it might be bigger than the image, but it's never reloaded! But there're the browser issues. I'm half-tempted to try duplicating most of the layout as CSS to see if it's possible, sans connection lines...

As to the magic... the human mind wants to find patterns and coincidences and meaning, even if there's nothing. Just looking at a grubby carpet, you'll start to see images (mostly faces) in it. Heck, I rely on this in a lot of my art - I have hints of a moment, and leave it open for the viewer as to what happened before and after, and this creates interest in what's otherwise a very simply-defined image. I've put something in it, and I have a story in mind as I work on the image, but it's not always the same one the viewer sees; they bring something of themselves to it. You're picking the colors, sizes, and locations from the patterns lurking in the data, and while the pattern the software sees isn't always clear, it's close enough to the ones we're half-aware of that it's spooky.

It's not something you can see in a stranger's map. It's something you can sorta see in a close friend's map, and it's definitely there in your own. And when you see an obvious pattern in something you start looking to see if it extends - for instance, here, the yellow/green hue is what I could refer to as "sexy freaks", while the cyan is 'other artists'. And then I see that

spacehyena is yellow, and I wonder if this means she's more pervy than I realize, or maybe the yellow's some other quality, or maybe it's just that this is the thing I think of most readily for that particular cluster? And why is it that some secondary journals closely match the primary one in color and size and position, while others are vastly different colors and some distance away? Why is my map so asymmetrical, physically centered more on my room-mate

prickvixen than myself?

And I want to find significance in this, because I'm bringing this information to it. Because it's about me and my relationship to the world. You've found patterns I'm not quite conscious of, and I'm adding my own knowlege to it.

Oh, here's another axis you could use for another relationship, if you have something you want to display but can't: font. Font weight, at least if not actual typeface. Normal, light, bold, and points in between or beyond.

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Source insight is unuseable at this small resolution. Stick to 800x600 on his machine.

I always try to use what I've got. And you'll notice here LJ and I split the burden: They carry 8k (soon I'll give them much more), and I serve up the rest. But that means they keep the same 8k, but I can change the rest. The rest can be alive in meaningful, clever ways. It could be alive. I don't want to give that up.

I've been called spooky. Early on I learned the hard way that my work makes inferences, delineates politics, and has the power to make people uncomfortable. I created it because someone made me uncomfortable. This is the noose around his neck. It's slowly closing. He's too dumb to notice or care, but I will know. There they are. There are the death lovers. The mundane monsters, grasping at ankles to pull us to their hell. I'll have a map.

Once I made a BBS. The local kids would call it. They'd go into this dungeon thing and fight these monsters. They developed all kinds of theories about when to fight and when to run. These lived on this mythology / inside scoop. I knew the fascinating truth that it was purely random. But they didn't believe me (!) when I told them. There was no convincing. You just knew.

I could develop fonts more. I'd rather make some names vibrate, or pulse in syncopated phases. I try to steer away from obvious social linguistic conventions (underline, italics) cuz it ruins the illusion. Suddenly you're groping for a key, so you can hurry up and turn the page. Perhaps I should just smear the whole thing more, so name

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Perhaps I should just smear the whole thing more, so name colors blur like fingerpaints.

I'm pleased by your explanations. This has been about you far more than me since the beginning. Few stop to consider this. It must be me, my doing, my rules, my magic. So I begrudgingly accept the role and duty of magician.

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lenablair.livejournal.com

One thing I haven't seen you talk about at all is trying to map generations and age groups. Obviously complex because not everyone's got it listed, and most LJ users are friends with almost all people from their own (or at least the same) generation. This seems like an obvious way to go to me because on my personal mindmap everyone's jumbled together, but all the people older than I are very close to me, whereas those my own age are farther away.

Also, this is definitley coding on the border of art.

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Thanks for the praise.

It's unfortunate that I don't have access to reliable age information.

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abirritate.livejournal.com

Livin' on the edge! I wonder what being teal means.

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