Comments on: FeedVis: a deeper tagcloud for edublogs

By: jason

jason — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:19:48 +0000

Offray, thanks for your comments, and my apologies for not getting back to you sooner; I’ve been overseas and had very limited internet access.

Sorry that you’ve had trouble getting FeedVis to run on your server. If you email me with the specifics of your problem, I’m reckon we can get it solved; so far most people have been successful after we tried a few things.

As for a mailing list or group around FeedVis, you’re more than welcome to get something like that started. I’m afraid getting starting here at UNC is taking 110% of my time right now.

Thanks again for the kind words and encouragement. It’s great living in a time and place where even a novice programmer like me can make something that folks find interesting. The Internets: it’s gonna be big.

By: Offray

Offray — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:08:19 +0000

Thanks for FeedVis. It got lots of attention on the web and seems also having a lot of potential. I ave tried on my own machine but I can not get any of the results I want, not event see the demo post because I can’t go back in time and the post of the tags are so old that they not get listed properly. Trying to upload my own opml didn’t work either (I don’t know why).

We try even to understand the code (I’m not a programmer but I have a friend who makes php) and your notice about trying to refactor it and seeing the mess and not having the time makes me thing if there is any way to keep the good ideas of FeedVis rolling, may be even with your small time. Perhaps a mailing list or group could work.

Thanks for the good ideas and preliminar work and sharing your learning and keep the feedback even with the small amount of time.

Cheers,

Offray

By: jason

jason — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:14:55 +0000

@Willem, I’ve got two suggestions:
First, check the path to your cache in frontend/cache_locations.php; you may need to use absolute (like “/home/yourname/public_html” etc) rather than relative paths. You might also just double-check to make sure you didn’t include a typo or something.

Second, as you suggest, it may have to do with the way permissions on your server are set up. AFAIK, your best bet there is to contact your administrator. I’ll look into it and see if I can’t find another solution, though.

If you still have trouble, feel free to send me your opml, and I can run it on my server while you figure it out.

By: jason

jason — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:08:45 +0000

@Lilia, thanks! You’ve got a good idea there; I spent quite some time trying to decide on which words should be stopwords and which shouldn’t; I ultimately went with the shorter list. Why not just let the user decide?

If you run the program on your own server, it’s easy to edit the stopword list, but I think you’re right that end-users should be able to do it, too. Shouldn’t be too hard to add…look for it in the next release.

By: Willem

Willem — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:38:23 +0000

Great view!
I try to get this running for Dutch edublogs, but can’t get it to work.
Does the cache directory need writing permissions?

By: Lilia Efimova

Lilia Efimova — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 11:19:04 +0000

Jason, really nicely implemented! Something that I (personally) would like to see is the ability to filter “edu-stopwords” (e.g. those like “education” or “learning” to see themes in a bit more fine-grained way.

By: jason

jason — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:14:09 +0000

Thanks, Nicola! Making it clean and usable was definitely a priority for the project, so I’m glad to hear that you got that feel.

By: Nicola

Nicola — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 07:28:14 +0000

Hi, this is wonderful, I only came across it today – it is a really clean visualisation. I’ll be returning to it !
All the best with the programming too – this is pretty amazing considering how long you’ve been learning – congratulations,

Nicola