Question

I want to create a graph representing the frequency of updates to a site (for example, how often I have posted to my blog over the past 5 years). One obvious way to do this is to plot ‘number of entries posted per month’ for the past 60 months, but this feels unsatisfying. Should I be looking at using something like a rolling average instead? What are good visialisation techniques for displaying this kind of data?

Answer 1

Some ideas:

• rolling average
• instead of plotting the number of posts plot the time (or rolling mean time) between posts
• if it’s something that may have an annual / seasonal component, try plotting it on a circular / spiral plot where r is the datum and theta is the month, day of month, day of year, or whatever scaled appropriately. Some interesting things to plot for r might be
  • number of posts in an interval
  • cumulative posts (giving you a spiral)
  • length of post, (giving each theta it’s own exact value, not aggregating)
• you might also want to look at a scatter plot, with something like length of post on x, time since prior post + time to next post on y, and the age of the datum as the size, gray level or color of the point (fading out the oldest ones)