I had always "hacked" with the dot files to make the graphs more interesting. However, almost a year ago, the "dot" files were removed from the servers and no graphs were forthcoming. I finally got around to using the robot friendly friends data (info) to build a dot file generator in perl.
Dependencies: perl, graphviz dot program, and several fairly common Perl modules (Cache::FileCache, Data::Dumper, Digest::MD5, and LWP::UserAgent).
I made a conscious decision not to show the "active" user in the graph, but rather to focus on the inter-relationships between my friends.
More specifically, taking a look at my own graph:
Each node is someone who (i) I friended, (ii) who friended me, or (iii) both. An arrow between two nodes, e.g.
When running the command, a user's livejournal password can be specified, in which case the nodes are colored based on the user's livejournal friends colors.
Download Script
EDITED 2004-08-30: Fixed URL so no password, sorry.
EDITED 2004-08-30 #2: Note, some of the "system" calls in the Main function are specific to my machine/OS X. Line 63 has a system command that points to the path of the "Verdana" truetype font on my machine. Line 64 sets the filetype on OS X and Line 67 opens the resulting image on OS X. 64 and 67 can just be deleted on non-OS X machines. Line 63 can be modified to point to your Verdana.ttf path -or- changed and then you can delete the reference to Verdana at line 141.
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