Author Archives: Brian

Geeky Fun with Google Charts

Leave a reply

The google charts API is a blast:

Pac-Man Chart

Pac-Man's Enemies

Star Trek Away Team chart

Some more text I found that I had written about google charts:
Something you might not know and I just fully realized the potential/fun in these….

Google has a nifty tool for creating on the fly charts/graphs called the Google Charts API. The cool thing is it’s all done in the URL – no server side includes, or programming or anything is needed and it’s pretty easy to do. You can totally customize how it looks and they have MANY different types of graphs and charts.

here is the URL for the chart below:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chs=500×200&chd=t:72,20,8&chl=Chocolate|Sour|Gross&chtt=Top-selling+Types+of+Candy

candy

Might be really useful to liven up a post every now and then. Do you think this idea is:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=250×125&cht=gom&chd=t:90&chl=Awesome

or is it:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=250×125&cht=gom&chd=t:5&chl=Terrible

terrible

You could make some pretty funny graphs/charts if you wanted. Think of a celebrity blog post about Britney:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chs=500×200&chd=t:74,5,15,5,1&chl=Crying|Shaving+Head|Eating|Singing|Wishing+she+had+K-Fed+back&chtt=How+Britney+Spends+her+Day

Britney

Competitor

1 Reply

Just a note for myself to log when it happened… I found a competitor to the new site we’ve been working on and they are doing lots of things we have already planned. Competition’s good though – keeps you on your toes. (if you’re lost, don’t worrry – none of this will really make sense to anyone but me)

XPath tip for Hpricot – no tbody

1 Reply

When using a plugin in Firefox to get the XPath of an item, be aware that Firefox inserts tbody tags into the source. So, if you get an XPath like

/html/body/div[@id='content']/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/div/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[3]

Do a View Source in Firefox and see if the tbody tags are actually in the source or not. If not, remove the tbody tags in the XPath then the modified XPath will work with Hpricot.