Monday, November 12, 2007

The Genea-Musings histogram

Hugh Watkins at his Exploring Rootsweb blog found an intriguing web site that creates a Histogram of a web site. You input the URL of the web site and it draws a histogram showing what type of HTML tags are used on the web site. Hugh's post is here. The Websites as Graphs web site is at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

Here is the Genea-Musings histogram:


What does the histogram mean? The page that displays the histogram explains the colors:

* blue: for links (the A tag)
* red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
* green: for the DIV tag
* violet: for images (the IMG tag)
* yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
* orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
* black: the HTML tag, the root node
* gray: all other tags

My histogram has lots of blue (links), gray (other) and orange (linebreaks), and few red (tables), violet (images) and yellow (forms).

I set this off at about 10 AM this morning and then noticed that my computer had been running continuously for awhile. I ended it after 30 minutes (it was still working), but not before taking a screenshot and saving it. Now I'm worried that perhaps this site is really a worm or something, but my McAfee didn't catch it or stop it.

It looks like there are 20 main spokes off the center wheel (I show 20 posts on this blog) and then analyzes each post for the different types of HTML tags.

In the end, it's interesting but fairly useless. I was hoping that it would show how the site links to other sites. Is there something like that out there?

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