Just wanted to say that I think your Heatmap.js plugin is awesome and I've used it extensively in a school project last semester.
I have one question about it. Is there a feature to remove some data points, or perhaps keep only some max number of data points in the heatmap so that the older ones are removed as new ones stream in kind of like a queue? Or is the only way to clear points redrawing the heatmap?
I think something like this is important because it allows for seriously real time heatmaps without getting too big and slow.
Frankly speaking, I have some similar idea the other day, what i thought then was to collect the top news.
I have the habits to read HN news everyday, mostly through my smartphone. News with more comments (>100 is hot) usually get more attentions. And I will bookmark news with more than 100 or 200 comments.
So thank you for your nice work, it will certainly make my life more easy~
- It's not possible to click links any more after applying the heatmap. This basically makes it useless, as you have to refresh to page in order to click a popular link.
thanks for the feedback, I should probably gather the row height of HN dynamically instead of having a hardcoded value that seems to work for my devices g
You should be able to click on the links again after closing the heatmap (there's a little x on the right upper corner of the heatmap control that makes the heatmap disappear)
I really like the idea. It's a nice way to go to what "probably" are the most interesting topics when you don't have much time.
I think that being able to click directly on the heatmap instead of having to close it first, and therefore not losing your visual aid, will be a big improvement.
Anyway, nice job.
P.S. I also have a problem with the height of the rows, tested both with Chrome and Firefox on W7.
Nice concept, unfortunately you get some strange results if you apply it to the new page (where I think it would have a much better use): http://i.imgur.com/afSPm.jpg
Is there a reason it seems to highlight at random?
It seems it pulls data from the HN homepage no matter what, so it's not analysing the contents of your current page. It then decides on the heat locations based on that data.
You're right, the description on the site is not very helpful, I'll add that.
TL;DR It's just a visualization layer above the HN frontpage. Hot means a post has either 'a lot of comments' or 'a lot of points' (configurable with the filter dropdown). It's not much but I was wondering whether anyone would be interested in having such a way of looking at HN. If there's someone who found that useful I'd probably develop it further
I was wondering the same thing. I expected this to be about click tracking, but it is just using the hacker news api to count the points or comment counts to produce the overlay.
