I haven't had the time to work on item trends in a while, the development has basically stood still during the last few weeks.
Normally I would have time to spend at least a few hours a week with these kinds of projects, but not at the moment. I'm not sure how long it will be until I will have enough spare time, but I'm hoping to be able to continue the development in a couple of weeks.
The next project for me is a project about monitoring the popularity of different items in online worlds, as posted in LokoNotes around new year.
The project aims to create a website from which users can view the trends in online worlds when it comes to which items people wear. This will be accomplished by statistic sampling of various profiles (which amongst other contains lists of item's currently worn) that people publish on the Internet.
The site could for instance be used to find out which items that are popular amongst a certain level range in a specified class in a game. It could also be used to see how rare the items one is wearing are. Or to see typical upgrade chains (which items people switch to after wearing item x for time y).
The project is a chance for me to apply some statistical knowledge. As a bonus I'm also going to take the opportunity to learn the ruby on rails framework and use it in this project.
My recent flurry of ruby-related notes might hint that the project is already underway. The information collection part is complete and running, some finer details in the data processing is currently being worked on. The work on the public web interface has not been started yet and most of the admin panels are still left. Those who are interested in the progress can check out the subversion repository, if you want to contribute then please contact me to gain write access.