Kiran Jonnalagadda ([info]jace) wrote,
@ 2006-04-19 20:35:00
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Charting traffic in [info]bangalore
Bangalore Community Traffic

For my upcoming session at Barcamp, I took the last four years of posts and comments stats for [info]bangalore and made a graph. I’ve never made a graph before and took the obvious route of Excel. This is ugly. It hurts my eyes. Can someone make it pretty? [info]mannu? Here’s the excel sheet, raw data (per post, monthly), and source for downloading calendar pages (sh) and parsing into CSV (py). Four posts were backdated (start here); I manually added them to the excel sheet based on the date of the first comment to each. Deleted posts—which were among the most interesting ones—are unfortunately not countable.

The community’s most active period was between May 2004 and May 2005. Comment spikes appear to correlate with post spikes. If both are redrawn to a percentage scale using daily instead of monthly stats, it should be easier to identify the volatile periods. How do I do that in Excel? What charting app should I use?

That huge spike in April 2005 (1209 comments) is clearly the work of our friends at [info]wearesphinx. It should be interesting to relate other spikes with specific events:
  • Within the community (above mentioned friends and their brethren),
  • Within LiveJournal (invite codes removed Dec 2003, spike from 81 to 236 comments in Jan 2004, remains above 100 henceforth), or
  • Elsewhere (Rajkumar dies, riots in Bangalore Apr 2006, 535 comments).
Anyone game for playing tag?


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Not sure if this'll be of any help,but..
[info]clueless_rebel
2006-04-19 03:45 pm UTC (link)
I use this site http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/graphing/ to create graphs for my projects.
Good Luck!

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[info]bluesmoon
2006-04-19 04:21 pm UTC (link)
looks like an excellent excercise for the Yahoo! term extractor

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[info]ravi
2006-04-19 05:44 pm UTC (link)
Have you looked at Rails? They've got a graphing package that makes really sweet graphs for not much effort, from what I know.

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yupp.. 'Gruff'
[info]jd_knight
2006-04-19 05:53 pm UTC (link)
..and its really cool! http://nubyonrails.com/pages/gruff

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[info]ga_woo
2006-04-19 06:23 pm UTC (link)
Ruby! Ruby! Not Rails! Rails is just a web framework.

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[info]jd_knight
2006-04-19 08:21 pm UTC (link)
well, by saying Rails, isnt the Ruby part implied :p but yes, Gruff has nothing to do RoR specifically, i agree.

and yes, these demo graph pics generated using gruff are worth drooling over.. !
http://geoffreygrosenbach.com/projects/show/5

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[info]ga_woo
2006-04-20 07:46 pm UTC (link)
Gruff isn't even included with Rails.

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[info]sumit_mittal
2006-04-19 10:52 pm UTC (link)
has some1 sent the beautified one, or do u still need it?

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[info]jace
2006-04-20 02:11 am UTC (link)
Still needed. I'm getting all sorts of other graphs.

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[info]sumit_mittal
2006-04-20 06:58 pm UTC (link)
you just need it beautified, right?

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[info]jace
2006-04-21 03:08 am UTC (link)
Yes. [info]mannu just sent me a nice Flash version.

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[info]mannu
2006-04-20 09:43 pm UTC (link)
See if this (SWF) works for you.

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[info]jace
2006-04-21 03:07 am UTC (link)
Thanks, that looks great, but can't I use it from disk? I get an endlessly spinning clock.

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[info]mannu
2006-04-21 08:29 am UTC (link)
It's probably stuck trying to load "monthly.csv" from the current directory. I would've expected it to give an error at some point. Anyway, so try putting the monthly.csv file in the same directory you're running it from.

You might still run into Flash Player security restrictions (can't load local file from disk) if you have a newer version of the player. If that happens, try running it from a local HTTP server.

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Just a thought on useless posts
[info]yodha
2006-04-23 03:16 pm UTC (link)
If we presume that useless flamebait posts have a high anon-user/reg-user comments ratio, then it should be easy to automatically generate a list of such posts from the database (and also to mark them on the graph). This also means that such posts can be subtracted from the total and we get the useful posts. But, all this holds only if my premise is true.

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Re: Just a thought on useless posts
[info]jace
2006-04-23 03:51 pm UTC (link)
But that assumes the useless posts are truly useless. Could it be their entertainment value is responsible for enough people hanging around to answer the boring/useful posts?

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Re: Just a thought on useless posts
[info]yodha
2006-04-23 04:01 pm UTC (link)
I see. A balanced ecosystem.

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Why not try zohosheet.com
(Anonymous)
2006-04-24 10:08 am UTC (link)
Your excel sheet could be read online with zohosheet.com . Hope you would love it and if you are still interested go check out www.zoho.com

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