Unconnected Work and Unconnected Nodes

I spent the weekend programming non-stop ... unfortunately it wasn't for this project. My friend is a storyline writer for a company that makes games for facebook. They were having him input all his stuff directly into a database using phpMyAdmin, instead of providing him with any sort of nice interface. (For example, suppose he had written a questline called "Line A", with outcome "Outcome B". Questlines would be in one auto-indexed table, and outcomes would be in another auto-indexed table. He'd have to remember the indices for each, so that he could input them into a third table relating quests to outcomes. Really annoying, and not exactly something a creative writer should have to be concerned with!) They wouldn't give me direct access to the database, but I made him a program that lets him insert his stories into an intuitive interface, and it outputs SQL statements that he can just copy and paste into his work's phpMyAdmin. It was actually incredibly fun to work on this! I had to learn to use PHP and AJAX and all sorts of stuff I'd never done before. I felt crazy-motivated and did nothing by program and sleep for two days. (Sadly, I've yet to feel like this about the nserc project! Still two months left though, I suppose!)

Today I tried to tackle JSViz's lack of support for disconnected graphs... without much success. The best I can come up with so far is to basically scrap the pretty graph animation so that the disconnected nodes don't have time to get completely repelled to the sides of the container. At the end of last week I was talking to Brent about how he approached this problem. For each disconnected section of the graph, he anchors one node down so that it can't be moved -- a straightforward idea, but I don't really want to anchor the graph, because I think being able to move it is an excellent feature. Then again, I might just give in and use this approach, because everything I've tried seems to be overly complicated, or really ugly. Someone please write me a better visualization tool, k thanks!