Feeding time

[hatmandu]

Here's a silly LJ 'personality test'. It uses three of the feeds described at the LJ bots page - the interests feed has a handy list of the popularity of each interest a user lists; then there's the list of friends/friendsof; and the RSS feed to grab a recent entry and run a readability index on it.

Comments

[lexabear]

I wish it went into more detail about how it categorizes writing styles. Mine was "overcomplicated."

[deana_in_texas]

Well, it doesn't specifically say it uses the latest entry, just "a recent public entry" - two or three back is recent... maybe it scans until it finds one it likes?

[hatmandu]

I've got a new one in the pipeline (launching in a few days) which does a much more detailed analysis of writing samples - this one just runs a readability index on the most recent public post, which often isn't a large enough sample. Watch this space! ;)

[hatmandu]

Brilliant - thank you. I confess I hadn't spotted that (and, erm had been too lazy to investigate yet). :)

[_hedgewytch_]

It doesn't work for me - I just get an error.
Might be cos it can't handle the underscores sigh

"Sorry - there was a problem. Check your username was typed properly and Try again."

[hatmandu]

Hm - LJ's feed for you has a different URL structure to the normal one, maybe because of those underscores. I'll investigate and hopefully can tweak the script - I'll let you know!

[_hedgewytch_]

oooh that would be great thank you!
I saw you were writing another one ;o)
Excited to see when its ready

[hatmandu]

Thanks! Anyway, it's fixed for you now - though you get a low score because your journal is friends-locked (this means the script can't reliably get at your writing). Or maybe you're just not weird! :)

The new one is almost finished but I'm waiting a little to launch it as there's been so much traffic to the first one - I don't want to upset my site hosts...

[puzzle_]

It doesn't like names that end in a underscore.

[hatmandu]

Oops - fixed!

[dpash]

I'd suggest that your maths is wrong somewhere as you have a below average weirdness yet you're weirder than 56% of lj users.

[hatmandu]

Ah, but no - the data has a high standard deviation (around 31). The overall average is currently 27, but more than half of people have a figure below that, balanced out by a smaller number of people with much higher 'weirdness' (the highest figure currently is over 2000! - lord-tarran, for example - check out their latest post and that would rather explain it...). Only 50 people out of 50,000 have a weirdness over 150 - but it all helps to keep the standard deviation high. Obviously, I wouldn't want to meet any of 'em on a dark night.

[kvschwartz]

I suspect you are confusing median with average / mean.