T w e n t y S i d e d

Fledgling %Otaku has several more website graphs like the one I put up a couple of days ago. Then there is an interesting exchange in the comments of that post about the appearances of different sites when viewed as graphs. Some sites are just a few tightly packed nodes. Some are sparse and sprawling. Some, like this site, are a bunch of different patterns all hanging together.

So I started thinking about what other pages I might feed into this thing and what they would look like.

First, if you remember from a few days ago, this is the site you are reading right now:

Now let’s look at Google:

Talk about minimalisim! Just under 60 total tags. This explains why the site loads so quickly. There are two purple tags – two images. One would have to be the Google logo itself, but I wonder what the other one is?

Now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum:

This is the printer-friendly version of my book, which has the entire novel on one page. (If you’re curious, you can see it here. It may take a bit to load for some of you, as it is well over 400k of HTML.) This represents about 330 pages of text. The orange dots are paragraphs, and the grey tendrils are areas in bold or italics. I’m rather surprised at the number of tables (red dots) spread around. Now compare that to this:

This is In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, which is a very large essay (highly recommended, by the way) with no formatting or images. So now we can see that large blocks of prose tend to look like huge orange dandelions.

This is fun. Go on. Try it for yourself.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.