After killing off Hot Stuff due to a server upgrade, I find that I'm kinda missing it! So, I've decided to have a second stab at the problem and this time the code is much cleaner and faster. In particular, I'm using Bloglines to handle fetching all of the feeds and then grabbing the new [...]
Posts under ‘Eye Candy’
Dewey friend wheel
I've been meaning to have a stab at creating something similar to a friend wheel, but using library data, for a while now. Here's a prototype which uses our "people who borrowed this, also borrowed…" data to try find strong borrowing relationships… I picked three random Dewey numbers and hacked together a quick PerlMagick script [...]
Psycho collage
Following on from the book covers arranged by hue/lightness, I've been playing around with the 1000 Frames of Hitchcock thumbnails. Here's the result of 15 minutes of coding and 2 hours of rendering using a single frame from the famous shower scene in Psycho… To see the individual frames, you really need to view the [...]
Our books, arranged by Hue and Lightness
Sunday afternoons were made for doing this kind of thing… (click here for the biggest version) Several thousand of our books, arranged vertically by hue and horizontally by lightness. The value was calculated by finding the average colour of the book cover and then converting that to the relevant HSL value. There's a little bit [...]
Edible Pie Chart
This opens up all sorts of possibilities for tasty representations of data (found at information aesthetics)
Playing with Processing
Iman first mentioned Processing ages ago, but it's only recently I've gotten around to having a play with it. So, this is my first stab at coming up with something visual and it's in the same vein as Dewey Blobs… …you'll need Java installed to view it. Rather than lay Dewey out on a 2D [...]
Reshelve all your books by the colour of their spine
Thanks to Iman for jogging my memory about this blog post which I'd been meaning to blog about for the last couple of weeks — in fact, I was chatting to someone after the ARCLib Conference in Liverpool last week about it, but couldn't remember the name of the library for the life in me [...]
Dewey Blobs
I've been fascinated by data visualisation for a year or two now, and I've recently been chatting to my good friend Iman about doing something with our circulation data. In particular, something that will be visually interesting to look at, whilst also giving you a feel for the data. I've tried a few different things, [...]
Visual virtual shelf browsing
The Zoomii web site seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, so I got wondering how easy/difficult it would be do to a virtual bookshelf in the OPAC… It's definitely a "crappy prototype" at the moment, and the trickiest thing turned out to be getting the iframe to jump to the [...]
Google Graphs
We've had loan data on the OPAC for a couple of years now, although it's only previously been visible to staff IP addresses. Anyway, a couple of months ago, I revamped it using Google Graphs and I've finally gotten around to adding a stats link that anyone can peruse — you should be able to [...]