How to create (nice) charts
By maurizio | May 22, 2008
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NOTE this is an old post I wrote more than 6 months ago. I haven’t finished it and I am not planning to finish it. I am posting it to see if someone is interested. If there is some interest I will go on. (I know how it will end.. :-) )
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I promised to write about that and here it is. There are many possibilities to create nice charts for your blogs; you can create a chart with a programming language of choice and then put it in an image that you will load on your posts or you can create the chart on the fly. You can also use a flash based empty chart and put the data later. I prefer to use the latter option because it’s easy to learn and you can reuse your code easily. If you check my latest two graphs about the “John Chow vs. Shoemoney” competition, I wrote the HTML code once and I just copy&pasted it on the second post.
How does the flash based charts works? A flash chart is a program that is just waiting for data. When you give it your data path, the software will read them and create all the information needed and then it shows them on the provided space.
The charting software I used on my previous posts is FusionCharts. They offer a free version that’s perfect for my experiments.
The best way to learn how to use this kind of stuff is to look at some examples. In my case I wanted to create a line chart with 2 different lines, so this example on the documentation was very handy. On that page you have a big button called Show XML. Press it and you will see the core of the chart. The file that will open is an XML file with all the datas needed by the chart application to create a nice looking chart of the data.
If you watch the xml AND the resulting chart at the same time, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand how the data are divided. The chart shows 4 different lines (Offline Marketing,Search,Paid Search and From Mail). It’s not difficult to discover on the XML that there are 4 different “things” that have those 4 names on it. ( If you know a bit of HTML you will understand XML in seconds, since XML could be considered a very clean HTML with your own tags.) If you are seeing the XML inside Firefox (and even in IE if I remenber correctly) you are lucky because the browser print the XML with a nice indentation that allow you to spot on the fly how object are built. Starting from the four names above, you’ll discover that those “object” are called dataset which means that are build inside their own Xml Tag ( <dataset> …. </dataset> ).
Topics: Programming, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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Back again!
By maurizio | May 19, 2008
I am back again!
After more than 6 months, here I am. I spent the last 6 month moving to another (big) city. Actually I spent less than a week doing that and the rest of the time I just tried to get used to my new home city.
Now I decided to go back to my blog because I can’t wait until I’m used to here before writing something again. And it will probably takes me decades to get used to here.
I’ve noticed that my blog receives more or less 30 users every day even if I’m not posting a single new thing. Most of them are just reading “my” funny haiku post. Which is in some way sad because I haven’t written that haiku myself; but at least I can prove that funny posts are a good thing.
Topics: Ramblings | 2 Comments »
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MyBlogLog is getting dumber
By maurizio | November 27, 2007
I already hate the fact that I had to open (another) Yahoo account to be able to use MyBlogLog again, but the stupid thing is that I can’t upload my old image. Every time I try it ask me to crop it. if I put a 4×4 pixel image it still ask to crop it. What’s happening? I thought they get better with Yahoo…
Topics: Ramblings | 6 Comments »
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I still exist and thoughts about my blog and PageRank
By maurizio | November 26, 2007
Hi.
I know it’s been ages from my last post. I am/was busy because I’ve finally found a (new) job! And I have to move. :/
Anyway..
I wanted to post my “how-to create charts” post but it’s still uncomplete. I think I’ll post it in 2 parts.
Please note my PageRank. Now it’s down to 0. Why? Probably because I wrote to them (using the tool inside Google Webmaster Tool) stating that I did something wrong and pointing at my post about Andy Coate’s viralink post I did ages ago. I even corrected it. Of course that wasn’t the problem for them, but it was for me.I read Google TOS and they say I shouldn’t post something that is confusing for my readers, and that post is full of useless link so that was the only mistake I did, IMHO. They probably decreased my PR because I wrote some PayPerPost review, but I still believe they are not confusing my readers. If a reader doesn’t trust my reviews he can just skip them. If he trust me he can still check by himself. I haven’t found anywhere that they don’t want paid links; maybe I should check again.
If you can show me where they clearly write that I can’t have “FOLLOW” links on sponsored posts, I’ll “NOFOLLOW” all of them. No problem for me, but FOLLOW or NOFOLLOW are not confusing my readers; they are probably confusing just google.
Anyway I don’t really mind now. I’m upset but whatever.. I’ll probably stop writing PPP post because there aren’t interesting stuff to post about anymore (I haven’t checked lately though).Maybe I can’t even post now that I’m down to 0. Whatever..
The upsetting thing of the week (actually of the last weeks) is ShoppingAds that sent me an email stating that my account was blocked. I don’t remember why because I can’t find that email. Maybe is because I haven’t received an email but they just wrote it on my account page. Anyway I still don’t see anything appearing on my right sponsor space, which is very disappointing, because I was hoping to have at least a couple of referral subscriber since I published it very early.
I’m starting to consider throwing away all that ads stuff on my blog, but then I will lose the experience of managing this kind of stuff on a blog.
On a side note, I’ve noted that I have at least 15-16 reader daily, even if it’s almost a month that I’m not posting anything. This is in some way good and in some other bad. It’s good because I have some kind of traffic even if I don’t post. It’s bad because I usually have 20-25 readers, which means that I’m making efforts to post stuff and just 10 people are coming here to read my new posts.
Topics: Ramblings | 2 Comments »
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