Zach's Journal - sparklines!

If you're reading this in some other place than Planet Lisp, go take a peek at Planet Lisp.

For each blog to which Planet Lisp subscribes, I made a little graph showing how frequently that blog has had its posts in Planet Lisp. It appears in the right-hand sidebar of the page. There are twenty-six bars, and each bar represents two weeks, so the graph goes back a year. Each vertical pixel represents one post, except when there are zero posts (I still write out one pixel of the bar, in a lighter gray) and when there are more than 16 posts (I write out 16 pixels, with a red strip across the top). Here are a few examples:

• Zach Beane
  
• Gary King
  
• Paul Dietz
  

(Come back, Paul!)

The idea is from Tufte, and the choice of bars is from sparkline.org. The code is, of course, written in pure Lisp and uses skippy to write out GIF files.

It's a little embarrassing to have so many flatliners, so I may use this info to prune some feeds in the near future.