Visualize Your Wordpress Blog Posts and Categories

Using the free trial version of Constellation Roamer you can easily visualize the blog posts and category tags for your Wordpress blog! All you need is access to your web server and the ability to edit some simple configuration variables. The result will look something like this:

Showing Your Wordpress Data in a Flash Network Visualization

I've already written up most of the code for visualizing your Wordpress blog. All you have to do is follow the steps below.

1. Download this ZIP archive containing all the necessary files. Go ahead and extract them.
2. Pick a folder on your web server where you will upload the files and note the URL to that folder. Don't upload anything just yet.
3. Set the XML configuration parameters. Open constellation_config.xml and find the <url> tag. Now, change "http://example.com" to the URL of the folder on your webserver. It should end up looking something like this:

   <url>http://myurl.com/myfolder/constellation_get_tree.php?node_id=[node_id]&amp;depth=[depth]</url>

4. Set the PHP configuration parameters. Open up constellation_config.php and set the database connection values:

   $dbServer = 'localhost';
   $dbUsername = 'myUsername';
   $dbPassword = 'myPassword';
   $dbDatabase = 'myDatabaseName';

5. Now, open constellation_roamer.html and find the selectedNodeID. This is the ID of the first node that will appear. Change the value to either a blog post ID prepended with "p_" or a category ID prepended with "c_". You can find blog post IDs and category IDs in the Manage Posts and Manage Categories sections, respectively. The resulting line should look something like:

   var startNodeID = "c_10";

6. Okay, it's time to upload the files to that folder on your webserver. Once that's done, point your browser to the constellation_roamer.html file and you should see the visualization in action!

If you look more carefully at the PHP and XML files, you'll notice that there are a lot of options for customizing the colors, shapes, and fonts in the visualization. You can find more details in the Constellation Roamer integration page.

If you have problems or would like to see features added, give me a shout or post a comment below. Enjoy!

Update! I've updated the ZIP archive above to use the latest version of Constellation Roamer (v1.1) and I've also cleaned up the script a bit. Enjoy!

This was posted on April Fool's day, but it's after noon so it's no joke! I hope you saw Google's funnies, though.