goofing off with graphs

[egypturnash]

I played around with the source file for the LJ friends network grapher that never seems to work any more.

If you have SVG viewing capabilities, then go take a look at my friends/friends-of network.

Note that the positioning of the names means nothing; it's all just what the graph drawing program chose based on the way the network is set up.

Comments

[riose.livejournal.com]

A Pegacentric universe... very graphic!
Much more intuitive than text-based lists of friends.

Did you fix the source code for LJ proper, or just for your own instance?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

No programming was involved, just looking at some html source, tracking down and installing a graph-drawing tool, and perusing some man pages.

You can get a similar graph drawn by another program in the same graph-drawing suite if you go to the second link I made; replace my name with anyone else's. LJ isn't hosting the program that actually draws the graph for you, though, and I think AT&T may have gotten sick of LJ leeching their CPU and bandwidth for that page. Someone has also set up a server on their own machines to do it; I have a link in my bio, or you can look through the 'lj_nifty' community.

I used 'nifty' instead of 'dot'; it's part of the 'dot' graphing package, and generates the much prettier circular graphs. (It's no relation to the 'lj_nifty' community.)

I tweaked the .dot file a little to set colors based on the color scheme I use for my journal and my website, and played with the command line I gave it - I think I ended up doing something like 'nifty peganthyrus.dot -opeggy.svgz -Tsvgz -Elen=5.5' - the -o and the -T chose the output file and told it to do an svgz, the -E spread out the graph so it was visible! Using the default edge lengths squishes it all down into a little wad, and, unfortunately, the edge length that works varies depending on how many friends you have.

(looking at the docs, I wonder if setting the 'minlen' edge option would work better... maybe! I might experiment!)

[riose.livejournal.com]

Ayep, it appears that AT&T isn't dealing with it anymore when I try it. At least they return an error about script length, or some such.