Oct 07 2008
Comment is Good
I should like to remind those of you, lurking, and I know you exist, that commenting is positively encouraged. Like what you see? Let me know. I have oft likened myself to a small wet springer spaniel. Pat me on the head and my tail wags away happily!
Guilty yer honour. x
How did you do that little graphy thing there?
I have to lurk because if I actually commented what I thought when I saw all the amazing things you make you’d end up with a very jealous Dougal.
The little graph on the left… is a “sparkline”. It’s a sort of miniature, simplified graph designed to give a high-level impression of the way data changes. The changes shown are the number of recipes we’re cooking each week, with the far left being the first week in January and the right-most being the current week. The latest recipe added is marked with a blue dot. The highest and lowest points are shown with green and red dots, respectively, though you can’t see the green at the moment because it’s in the same spot as the blue.
The program that generates this graph is my own, and the source code is available if that kind of thing interests you! In short, it reads the challenge page and looks for links to specific blog posts. If there’s a link we know the recipe is _done_, if not it’s still _todo_. The dates are extracted from the links of each post, although this means I’m using the blogging date as a surrogate for the cooking date. It’s the best we can do, short of going through the entire archive and changing all the posts to the correct dates! ;-)
Three things this graph really demonstrates are (a) how keen we were at the beginning of the year, (b) how badly we did during the spring-summer months and (c) how hard we’ve been working in the last couple of weeks to catch up.
I am eternally sorry, the only thing I can ever think to say is ‘That looks amazing’ or ‘I ate beans out of the can for dinner tonight. I hate you’.
Wowzers Dougal, you *are* clever. I might just have to think of a reason to need to use that! I love me a new gadget.
Can you invent something that doesn’t eat my first comment always? Darn Akismet.
Boo, sorry about that. It must have been the way you mentioned car insurance and online poker…oh no, hang on.
No idea why it ate you. It’s normally so spot on!