it’s getting hot! treetonin now with node temperature

I just added a feature to treetonin and it’s called node temperature. It is inspired by the PageTemperature plugin for the Kwiki wiki. About a year ago I was about to start a private project with two co-workers. We had some good ideas but not enough time to finally get it going.

While setting up the infrastructure for this project I discovered Kwiki, a highly modularized wiki that was installable entirely through CPAN. CPAN is obviously not a code hosting solution for everyone, as it is the place for all things Perl (and some C/C++ for XS modules), so you can’t really compare it to Github. But the approach of publishing a system as a set of individual modules bears some similarities to Rails apps that are in essence glue code to combine gems and plugins, each of which can be obtained from Github.

Enough talking. Here’s a screenshot of the current status of the awesome treetonin project with the node temperature feature already baked in.

This first version the feature just translates the age of the node to shades of red by calculating ((current – oldest) / (latest – oldest)) * 255 and using the result as the red component. Both green and blue remain 0, so I scale from black to shiny red. Future versions might evaluate the number of updates and visualize it as font size, or the amount of data stored as border thickness, or something completely different.