What is XFN Graph?
XFN Graph is a tool for visualising the relationships between website authors, primarily bloggers who mark up their blogrolls with XFN markup. XFN stands for the XHTML Friends Network, and is a simple way to describe relationships between people within the framework of HTML.
XFN Graph uses this information to draw spider diagrams showing how sites link to one another. You can then see at a glance how you and your friends and acquaintances connect to others, and perhaps find new friends who share similar interests.
Here is an example of the output XFN Graph generates:
GeoffHolden.com (25th March 2005)
Meyerweb.com (25th March 2005)Join the project!
XFN Graph is an open‐source project. That means, the source code needed to compile XFN Graph is freely available for download for anyone who would like to help with the development of the program. To obtain the source code for the latest release, see the file download page.
If you're a Java programmer and you'd like to help by adding a feature to XFN Graph, or fixing some bugs, feel free to get in touch and let the team know.
Get the latest source code
The following steps were taken directly from the CVS How-To page on SourceForge itself and are relavent to UNIX and Mac OS X users only. If you're using Windows, see these instructions instead, and ignore the following, if you're using Mac OS 9, see these instructions.
- Navigate in a terminal/shell window to the directory where you want to store the project files (e.g. ~/Projects/)
- Copy and paste this line, then hit return:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@xfngraph.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xfngraph login - If asked for a password, leave it blank, and hit return again.
- Followed by this line and another return:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@xfngraph.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xfngraph co xfngraph
You should now have a folder called ‘xfngraph’, within which is an ant project file, and a few code files and libraries.
That should be enough to get you going. If you have any new code to pass on, email the developers and throw it over. You'll get credited, don't worry!