LastAftermath
Well, it's been a few weeks since I released LastGraph upon the world, and around a week and a half since I posted it to the Stats group on last.fm in an attempt to get some users.
Well, it certainly worked.
As I write, it's already passed the 2500 graphs mark, and that was after the counter was reset during an upgrade, so it's actually a few hundred more. People just keep coming, from various places; I've taken to having a Google Alert on the term 'lastgraph', to get some idea of how it's spreading.
Thankfully, the current hardware is just about up to the load. Over the past few days, I've got the site off a very old SQLite and onto a MySQL database; this means I've been able to bump up the number of webserving threads from one to around 30 (yes, the old sqlite wasn't threadsafe). I've also improved the graph colouring, and the renderer itself, to make them more efficient and portable.
I'll soon be releasing a lastgraph render client to the world, so anyone can contribute CPU time to the good cause of making pretty graphics; hopefully, I'll be able to keep up with the rising number of users that way, and perhaps even be able to give my laptop a rest every now and again.
Email notifications were added this afternoon, so now you don't need to remember to visit your user page all the time.
You're all doing a good job of promoting it, anyway. It's unnnervingly satisfying to check the queue and see that over a hundred users have suddenly appeared out of nowhere. My last.fm profile's shoutbox is getting the workout it never deserved, and things are generally going pretty well.
There is still work to be done; adding more nodes, adding more options, and trying to make even nicer graphs. But, still, it's come a long way in a few weeks, and I'm very happy about this. My host may not be, but a gigabyte of bandwith a day isn't that much transfer, really...
comments
Thanks for sharing this very nice project with all of us! I have an edited version of one of your graphs as my current desktop background.
I'm just now experimenting with generating similar inkscape SVGs myself, to generate a "lastgraph" of weekly musical tag clouds (I don't think this would be suitable to put online, as it require a bunch more database requests to generate the data for rendering). If you are planning to publish the code to generate the inkscape graphs, I would be happy to adopt it for such other purposes!
I am indeed planning to release the code at some point, and even better, the actual part which draws and renders the wavegraphs into SVG is separate from the fetching code (I have already used it to draw a wavegraph of a bank account's transcation history, for example).
You are right in that making the tag clouds for each week would be quite the data-grabber; it's either grabbing a tag cloud for each artist, which is quite bad, or for each track, which is more accurate but requires a very, very large number of requests :)
I'll be releasing the source code and a client so people can contribute back to the grid combined, once my exams finish sometime next week...