Another Visualizations Gallery
Here’s another gallery of data visualizations. All have large PDFs for download available.
Archive for March, 2008
WordPress 2.5 unleashed
The official release is now out. From the blog readers perspective you won’t see much different, but there are major differences in the administrative interface. Overall its much cleaner, with a more organized menu structure. The administrative dashboard supports widgets. For a seasoned Wordpress administrator I find the changes very nice — but for a new Wordpress user I think this is a big step forward in usability.
Static Archive of your WordPress site
There comes a time when all good things must come to an end — and sometimes that applies to web projects as well. I’ve got a website that utilizes WordPress as its content management system, and the project is over. It no longer needs to be a web 2.0 site, nothing is going to change AND we don’t want to risk that anything will. I don’t want to have to administer the site, keep its WordPress version updated, or have to be on the watch for spam or hackers. I’d be happiest if this archive was in straight html — less to worry about and reasonable assurance that it’ll be readable in the future. In the grand old days of static html this type of thing was easy — just copy the files to an archive directory and move on. But what to do in this new data-driven, dynamic html world?
HTTrack website copier is one solution. I tested it on my site, and it works as expected. The names of the static pages it saves out look a little whacky, but a future viewer won’t really care about that. The important thing is that you can pull up the index page in a browser, click on the links, and have them work — and this does exactly that. None of the functionality works — like the search box — but then you wouldn’t really expect it to. So before making the final archive I’m going through the theme and cleaning off things like search which won’t work, and don’t need to be in the archive.
Visualizing information
While vacationing last week Leslie and I paid a visit to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Boy, even on a rainy Tuesday morning it was crowded, but we saw some good stuff. The Design and the Elastic Mind has some interesting data visualizations. In the image pictured here they are showing internet traffic statistics on a globe. There was another interesting one that took the text to Alice in Wonderland and represented word frequency and proximity. Both interesting ideas, but I’m not sure how revealing they are towards better understanding those data sets. But its certainly worth trying — with so much data flying around these days I think visual representations offer the best route towards understanding and interpreting the world around us.
WordPress 2.5
I haven’t given it a test drive yet, but the new feature set sounds great. Nice to see that as good as it is, there’s a real committment to making it better. Also interesting that its been created with the input from Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria (among others!)– I’ll be going to my 3rd An Event Apart this year, so maybe they’ll talk about that a little. It’d be interesting to hear the thought process that went into this.
New Service tries to tame the mobil web
This company offers a service to convert existing websites into versions optimized to work in your mobile browser. It sounds really promising but in the handful of sites I tried it didn’t work very well. First strike against it is the intrusive ad placement. After telling mowser which site you want to view you first get a page of ads — all of which look rather ’spammy’. And this ad window reappears periodically after that. I appreciate their need to earn a buck, but this turned me off right away. And then for the pages I viewed, the delivery was somewhat better than normal, but still not very usable.
