undyingking (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
undyingking) wrote2007-12-18 10:20 am
undyingking) wrote2007-12-18 10:20 am
Google Chart API
Google may be increasingly evil, but now they allow you to generate a chart simply by passing a bunch of url parameters. How potenitally useful is that? (Very.)
To show what I mean, suppose I want to include a little pie chart in this post. Rather than go off and prepare it in some sort of charting application, I can just write it as an image tag like this:
<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Tasty|Pie">
which comes out like:
Of course this is even more powerful if you're using it programmatically to display interactively-generated data. As well as pie charts, you can do line, bar, Venn diagrams and scatter plots. And of course you can specify colour, fill pattern and all that sort of gubbins. All in the url parameters!
I now need to think of lots of exciting ways to use this facility. But, alas, just now I'm too busy to.
To show what I mean, suppose I want to include a little pie chart in this post. Rather than go off and prepare it in some sort of charting application, I can just write it as an image tag like this:
<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Tasty|Pie">
which comes out like:
Of course this is even more powerful if you're using it programmatically to display interactively-generated data. As well as pie charts, you can do line, bar, Venn diagrams and scatter plots. And of course you can specify colour, fill pattern and all that sort of gubbins. All in the url parameters!
I now need to think of lots of exciting ways to use this facility. But, alas, just now I'm too busy to.