Merb Mind Maps - a tutorial on RSpec, GraphViz & a little Merb

Netizens:

Crispin & Gregory's new book, /Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams/, has a kewt "mind map" at the start of each chapter. It inspired me to find a way to use the "tag cloud" on a blog to draw a mind map of the posts, linked by their tags in common.

The result is this little project:

   Radar – O’Reilly

It showcases...

  - graph theory - including Minimum Spanning Tree   - GraphViz - to typeset the mind maps   - Merb - a Rails-style website platform   - Ruby - that annoying language that won't go away   - RSpec - a Behavior Driven Development system   - transparent PNG files with ImageMagick drop-shadows   - assert{ 2.0 } - an assertion that reflects its expressions   - assert{ xpath } - the latest version of my assert_xpath system   - TDD for algorithms & graph theory!   - fixture-dependencies - a Rails fixture clone with more features   - GraphvizR - a lite Ruby gem that wraps GraphViz dot notation   - and even a tiny bit of HAML!

The algorithm itself depends on none of those things, so any blog could use the algorithm to present the mind-maps that are already latent within it!