Off The Charts With Google

Making Charts with Google API's

by Rupert Sharp
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 10 Dec 2007

Right just a mention of something that was brought to my attention, you can now create chart images using Google API's for use on your site or anywhere you feel like it. These seem quite useful and seem to have plenty of potential for adding dynamic Content to your site, but for those of us who are not willing to sit and read the spiel for the sake of a magical pie chart, this buds not for you. To be honest I thought it looked pretty daunting at first but after closer inspection there really quite simple, you just place parameters after "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?" and mess around with it until you've got it right, you then paste it straight into an <img> tag on your site and bob's your uncle. You have a host of useful options, such as obviously choosing the chart type (pie, line, venn diagram, bar and scatter), choosing the colour and transparency of the visual data element on the chart, naming them and so on.

The reason I think this API has potential for dynamic content is that with a bit of PHP say, you could link the URL parameters to a database and have it display current, changeable figures easily. This would make an informative and interesting feature to your site and being free it is also one of the cheapest. All other sites that offer dynamic charts also offer large bills, so going for a free service that does basically the same thing is pretty good; there is however a certain amounts of requests-per-day per user to the Google API URL but its in the ten thousands so it shouldn't cause any kind of problem.