instead of making a DB request
Can one? In general, is there an available (and working) API to LW?
The following is what I had in mind for that section:
maybe you can submit a DB request to the trike apps team for this data.
There is an API but I think it doesn't have the ability to do everything that we'd like it to. See this issue as an example of a missing feature.
But if you have the ability, building that feature and submitting it as a pull request is better than doing it the long way (since it also helps everyone else who wants to do that sort of thing in the future).
As a learning exercise, I wrote a web app which shows some charts on your karma score.
I recommend just going to the website and trying it out, but here is a description of it as well if you're interested. To use it just enter your user id in the text box at the top and then press the go button. It will show that it is loading and after a while five charts will be shown.
Please note that it may take a while to load. I am scraping all the information from your users page. It shouldn't take too long though. On my computer it takes less than a minute to load all the information on my karma score, but it did take around half an hour to load Eliezer_Yudkowsky's karma information. YMMV depending on what computer you are using. It is not your score that determines how long it will take, but the amount of comments and posts that you have made. I recommend using chrome as I haven't tested it in any other browsers.
The karma calculated by LessWrong also might be slightly different to what my web app shows. For example, my webapp shows Eliezers karma total score as 290096 and in LessWrong it is 290174. I am pretty sure that my code is right since I counted one example out and I do know of one bug in the LessWrong code that would effect the total score. There are also other things that LessWrong takes into account that I don't, e.g. karma awards and the troll tax. The difference shouldn't be too major, though, so it shouldn't be a big problem.
The website is hosted on github and the code can be found here.
TLDR: Try out the Less Wrong Karma Chart Website and let me know what you think or if you run into any issues.