I scraped my favorite blogs and made a graph from the domains that each blog links to. You can see clusters forming of websites that talk about similar topics, like crypto, rationality, Canada, India, and even postgres! The visualization was made entirely in webgl with some neat optimizations to render that many lines and circles.
Very neat! So you wrote the graph visualization UI? I see in prior project you used cytoscape - any motivation for doing it yourself this time (vs one of the available libraries)?
Yeah I used cytoscape before but it didn't have the full customization that I wanted. Besides the performance issues, there were some problems I couldn't have solved without a custom renderer
- if many lines overlap, how should their colors blend?
- how to render circles so that they look nice both zoomed in / out
- how to avoid it looking like a hairball graph [1]
The nice thing about a personal project is that I can do whatever I like with no constraints, so I built one that's suited for this project and fits my tastes.
[1] https://cambridge-intelligence.com/how-to-fix-hairballs/