clunkity » drudgington post

100

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:03:54 +0000

i currently have 100 followers on @drudgingtonpost. took two months and zero effort. not bad i guess. lets see how far it goes without actually pushing it. i’ve had a couple RTs…wish there were more. its common that people follow, then unfollow quickly after. i think people think they are following the official tweets or something. i scare them away. according to twittercounter i’m at a rate of 5 followers/day. i guess? seems high. some other interesting stats at that page. actually, the graph is retarded. the spacing of dates on the x axis isn’t uniform. wtf.

bump

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:40:27 +0000

obama isn’t the number one word of the day for once!

Drudge Report top 24h words: ahmadinejad obama us debate election iran its plan plutonium http://tr.im/l60J

Huffington Post top 24h words: mousavi ahmadinejad house under arrest iran latest updates cell http://tr.im/l60J

heck. wasn’t even in theh top 10 for huffington post! too bad it’s always bad news…

tweeting drudgington post

admin — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:02:12 +0000

i decided to start a twitter account for drudgington post. just to post latest headlines and what not. got to try out the twitter api. straight forward. we’ll see how much it actually works. i’m worried about duplicated headlines. need to figure out something more robust. @drudgingtonpost.

swine flu

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:38:05 +0000

all this swine flu news is really testing drudgington post. and for once, a different word is on top, besides “obama”: “flu”! at least in the 24 hours category. its also nice to see common news across drudge report and huffington post. we get more black words!

FairSpin

admin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:36:56 +0000

just saw a post on techcrunch about a site called FairSpin. it’s a site that categorizes political bias within the news. seems like an interesting concept. i’m only posting this because it’s somewhat related to drudgington post. trying to contrast headlines and words from opposite ends of the spectrum. however, FairSpin seems a bit more complicated. it’s all based on user input, which i feel would be hard to maintain. being completely based on users. i’ll keep an eye on the site.

chugging along

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:55:20 +0000

not bad. three weeks gone and drudgington post is still parsing fine. no quick fixes needed. i made a quick change to have it refresh the page every 15 minutes. (data is grabbed every 15 minutes).

drudgington ponderings

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:19:19 +0000

worked a little big on drudgington post. had to make a few quick fixes. i think i’m finishing up on it for now. probably little tweaks here…filter some words there…but nothing big. time to move on! anyways, on to my ponderings…

one of which i have no idea what’s going on. there seems to be a misassignment in memory or something. i’m editing an array for a word cloud. print_f shows it as it’s supposed to be. then i reference it (no editing or change or anything) and the last array value is incorrect. not sure what’s going on. so i just popped the last array entry off. workarounds… i decided to display the word clouds in frequency order. it loses it’s “randomness” for a word cloud. but this site is supposed to be clear and to the point. “hey these are the top words they use”. might sort them alphabetically…a compromise. another dilemma i’ve run into is which words i should filter out. nouns are usually straight forward. but what about adjectives/modifiers or verbs or whatever they are (pff grammar). like should i filter out the word “no”. it’s a common word and is pretty useless without context. but i feel like it deliniates tone. like negative adjectives and what not. but i’m beginning to see that keywords (mostly nouns) are going to dominate these adjectives anyways. anyways, i’m done.

drudgington post

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 04:01:43 +0000

so one of my current projects is drudgington post. you might be able to imagine what its like from the name. combining huffington post with drudge report. kinda. it’s a place to compare these sites. since they are the flagship news sites of their respective ends of the political spectrum, it’s interesting to see the differences. so i’m saving off their headlines and seeing what i can do to compare them. i shall talk about word clouds.

this weekend i made some decent progress. added word clouds from the headlines of each site. i used an existing php function i found online and made a bunch of modifications. such as how it limits the words it uses and how it calculates sizes. i also made it compare the words between sites. so if the word is unique to its site (not a major word in the other site) then it’s colored (blue or red). common words are left as black (or gray). one thing i noticed was that the word “obama” is used so much that it dwarfs all the other words. i had to essentially have the function ignore the word to not skew all the results. worked out pretty well. better at least. i am still in the process of creating the word block list. it’ll probably be done along the way as i see words useless words pop up. i dont want to prematurely apply a predefined list. id rather see the words in context to decide if i want to remove it or not.

some issues. right now it looks like some words sometimes don’t make it into the word cloud. like the word “obama” will occasionally disappear. i have to look into that. another thing i would like to look into is combining words that are the same but in a different form. like combine “vote” and “votes”. and what about popular two word combinations? like “white” and “house”. can i make it know it’s “white house”?

well that’s it for word clouds. i’ll make a different post describing the general background of drudgington post soon.