A while back, I created a kind of dashboard into my writing statistics, courtesy of my Google Docs Writing Tracker tool. I never made the code for the dashboard available on Github mainly because it was highly tailored to me. Recently, I have been thinking about better ways of dashboarding my writing data, and it was my use of Github itself that provided a useful insight. I’ve created a heatmap of my writing in the past, and I liked the concept of it. So began wondering how I might produce a heatmap that would be a good representative of my writing. Then I remembered that just such a heatmap exists on Github to show my contributions:

What if I could produce a similar heatmap for writing, using data from my Google Docs Writing Tracker? So I have started to experiment with this. Turns out, it is probably relatively easy. Github uses the D3.js object model for producing the year-long calendar interface for the contribution chart, and that library looks fairly easy to use. I’ve started to experiment with some sample code. Once I have something that works, I’ll post the code to the Google Docs Writing Tracker repo under a new branch and other people who use the tool can mess around with it and see if it works for them.

And as a reminder: my Google Docs Writing Tracker is freely available on Github to anyone who wants to use it, or improve upon it.