Kevin Pfeiffer, an avid participant in the Nearctic Arachnologists' Forum, finally got me to do something about the Flash-based charts on the species pages in the Nearctic Spider Database. While these older charts were great at the time, they've had their day. So, in light of the sparklines that Rod Page integrated into a "Biodiversity Service Status" pinger, I thought I'd take a closer look at Google Charts. Wow. The added plus for this service is the truly stellar documentation.
Rather than using a terribly long URL to get the PNG for the chart, I used a proxy. This way, I can pass the identifier to a local script that then grabs the image and dumps it on the page. And, I can give the chart a file name of my choosing.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Google Charts...Wow
Posted by
David Shorthouse
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The only problem with setting up a proxy is that your server is gonna be the one doing the actual requests to google charts. That means you handle all the traffic and that at some point, if you get terribly successful, you will hit the limits of the API. But as mention here, if you get that amount of traffic there is likely you will have other problems: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/lifting-limit-on-calls-to-google-chart.html
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