xkcd 715

I was playing with the idea to write an application inspired by xkcd comics 715 since it was released, but today I finally found time to whip it up!

The whole source code is a single webpage (HTML+Javascript/jQuery) around 100 lines long. It basically forms the query by replacing hash sign “#” with the particular number from loop and then asks Google via its Search API. Resulting data are shown via Google Visualization API. It doesn’t have much eye-candy yet, but it works and that’s what counts. :-) I put the presets Randall came up with and also added some of my own. I will now describe the first three in detail:

The first one was "xkcd #", which easily showed that the most popular issues were: 10, 12, 244, 385, 427, 449, 452, 505, 701, 705 and 714.

I continued with "# czechoslovakia", which of course spotted the most important years of the 20th century for this country (1918, 1938, 1945, 1948, 1968, 1989 and 1993).

The last one, "favorite number is #", shows the distribution of favorite numbers. Three, seven, eight and thirteen were expected, but I was surprised to see peak also at 42. I guess you know why. :-)

Bear in mind that there are still some outstanding issues and also if you have any ideas for interesting presets to add, I’d be more than happy to include them!

Ah, I almost forgot the link, so here it is: http://rusnak.io/cargo/xkcd715/. Enjoy!