It contains two timelines: the first one displays all the posts, and the second one displays a subset. The subset is marked on the first timeline in blue. The two small grey handles control the extremes of the subset; drag them to limit or expand the selection. Each post is represented by a blue bubble. The size of the bubble changes according to the number of words in the post. If you hover the mouse over a bubble, the title and author of the post will appear. Also, the post will be marked in orange (in both timelines, if the post is within the selection).

Note: This visualisation is experimental. It takes advantage of some fairly new technology, which is, unfortunately, not available in legacy browsers, including every version of Internet Explorer.

After a bit of experimentation, and some head banging, I am very excited about the D3.js library. Most of the headaches were due to the lack of documentation. It is a fairly new project; so the headaches were knowingly self inflicted. The declarative nature of the library makes sense, once you get used to it.

I recommend reading through the tutorials. I spent too much time fighting with the transitions, until I re-read the tutorial and I understood them better.

Update

Today I reloaded the data to include the latest posts. Some people updated the first “Hello World” post, created by default by WordPress. So I created a second visualisation which uses the updated time rather than the published time for the posts. Take a look:

cortesi — Hilbert Curve + Sorting Algorithms + Procrastination = ?

Visualising sorting algorithms, examples and published code.