Hey guys I made a thing (Updated 2014-10-18):

Tilde Club Link Visualizer

(Also see ~jr's work on the same notion!)

Paul's list of Tilde Club Connections made me think, "hey, this is neat, I wonder if I can play with it." Turns out, sure, and I had a Saturday with nothing else burning, so I found the perl and shell tools that Paul uses to build his list (all at github) and set about tinkering.

The network graph above depicts links between Tilde Club users. Scroll around the window, zoom in/out, refresh to see it go all bouncy again, and/or drag the nodes to see more or different parts of the thing. You can now also mouseover to see highlighted links to other nodes, which I think might be the coolest. For best effect, zoom in and then mouseover where you can see a little more detail.

Since putting it up a few days ago, I've continued to tinker with it to improve the display and the data itself. It was great fun to discover ~jr working on the same thing and chat about our mutual ideas and thoughts about improving it. One of the key improvements was to correctly capture and handle links built by ~gschueler's javascript tool. Happily, I've been able to modify the scraping code that Paul started with to be a little more grabby in order to pick up those links, too.

What does this all mean? Nothing, really. It's a cool picture that moves when you drag it around, and it shows a view of some of the relationships that we make here. It doesn't tell us much about depth, or intent, and certainly not importance. For me it's a fun way to practice building something, learn a bit along the way, and now that it's built, to discover what's out there among Tilde Clubbers. It has made me happy to play with it, and gratified that a few people have told me it's cool.

I'd love to hear what you think! If you like it, let me know, because we all love using mutt around here.

Some technical detail

More stuff to do with this might include:


From here you could go back to my home page. Elsewhere it is pitch black; steam pipes, grues, etc.