Quick Project
I got a bug to do a quick little creative programming project this weekend, so I threw together some PHP scripts that create a visual representation of the interesting words in the most recent blog post in a given RSS or atom feed. It's pretty basic at the moment: it just parses the XML using the MagpieRSS library and creates a tag-cloud-style visualization (as seen on Flickr, del.icio.us, Amazon.com, etc.) of the top 100 most-used "interesting" words.
It hasn't been tested at all, so I'm sure it has some inherent brokeness, but it's kind of neat and gives a surprisingly quick feeling of what the blog post is about. I have a few ideas to make this a bit more interesting and possibly useful, but I'm not going to get into them at the moment, since it's time to go to bed. :)
Check it out: Interesting Words.
Comments
Nice work. I like the concept and it does give a good quick scan feel. What makes a word "interesting"? Have you just made a list of words that you find interesting? I'd love to see how it works on a much larger set of posts.
Posted by: Smithee | December 30, 2005 09:46 AM
An interesting word is one that's not "not interesting." :) I have a fairly short list of very common words that are filtered out and the rest in the posts are used to build up the cloud of interesting words. I'm in the process of tweaking a few things to pull out the most interesting words based on the individual feeds over a greater period of time. I'll definitely post something when that's ready for public consumption.
Posted by: Mike A.![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://blog.lot42.com/nav-commenters.gif)
|
December 30, 2005 02:33 PM
Thats really cool. Are you planning on making it say into a wordpress plugin or even simply releasing the code? Would be a cool addition to my archives page :)
Posted by: Simon | January 30, 2006 05:52 PM