Blog topology

Yesterday I had someone comment favourably on the “linkage” in my blog. Generally when I write a post, I try to refer back to one or two existing posts on the same topic. So in theory, there is an ever-growing Hasse diagram of posts. In practice, it’s nothing so pretty:

Internal link structure of EJRH

The hexagonal EJRH node is the home page, and it links to the categories (ellipses) and pages (rounded rectangles). Posts are rectangles and are linked according to their pingbacks. Pingbacks are normally inter-blog, but the major commenter on my own posts is me by way of other posts.

When I see components of one or two isolated posts, I feel a strong urge to retroactively connect them to something.  At least the graph has the property of planarity, even if it’s not drawn that way.

The diagram was drawn with yEd, using data generated from the WordPress export file and processed with a stylesheet into GraphML. The stylesheet also draws links from the categories to their constituent posts, but that makes the diagram really messy.

The graph above is just an image, but in yEd the nodes are also hyperlinks to their respective blog locations; perhaps there’s a way to integrate it into WordPress…