Tag: googlecharts

I'm a big fan of the google charts API - it draws much better-looking graphs than I would ever manage and all I have to do is assemble the right URL to make it work. I recently got a feature request to add QR codes to joind.in, so that speakers and event admins could easily allow people to link in to a particular talk page.

I seem to blog about graphs a lot at the moment, but that's because I am seeing a lot of them, with one thing and another. I recently added some little bubbles to the line graphs produced by Bitestats (obligatory elevator pitch: one-page, simple summary report pull from your google analytics account). I think they are kind of cute.

Once I got going with them, they were actually pretty straightforward. You can actually add all kinds of markers to your google chart, complete with funky icons and customisable colours! The code I added to make these is simply:

All we have here is a simple specification of which kind of bubbles I want, the label for them and which data series (ds) and data point (dp) to attach it to. I generated the bubble tail directions sensitive to whether they were a min or max label, and which half of the graph they are in.

Google Charts API is a nice, freely available tool for creating really good-looking graphs very painlessly. Don't be fooled by the "API" bit though, there is no need for advanced understanding of HTTP here - you generate most graphs just by adding parameters to a URL! In this post we'll take a look at a few different ways to generate charts.

Recently I've been working on a project using Google Charts API and I absolutely love it. It makes pretty graphs and shows data really nicely - and it's very painless. I did trip over a little trick today though which took me a little while to work out, so I thought …