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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> ).

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If you are watching my site with Internet Explorer you’ll see some weird position for the posts. I am sorry but I have no idea why it happens. I know that the chart’s html code must be all on the same line to avoid problems (due to wordpress), but I have no idea why the posts on IE are down there (or here if you read it with IE :-) ). I hate when the two browsers render the pages differently. I used to worry a lot about the behaviour on IE, but lately I’ve noticed that most of my readers use Firefox so I don’t mind that much anymore.
I am not blaming IE to behave wrongly; I think it’s Firefox that is behaving wrongly probably. I noticed a lot of times that Internet Explorer is simply more strict on the way it renders HTML. It means that when you make mistakes on HTML, IE shows the code wrongly because you’ve made a mistake. Firefox instead try to understand what you meant and it shows the code “correctly”. On this case IE is the right one; it’s better to show you the mistake rather than guessing what you meant.
Anyway it’s not always like that. Most of the times is IE that guess in the wrong way.

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Shoe played his card just 2 days ago because the the huge spike is visible just today (with yesterday stats, remember?). He gained almost 5000 readers in just one day. That’s a lot of readers. I wonder if he used a trick or he just added a subscription popup on one of his ringtones site.

I think I can say that both are winners. Shoe can brag about being the winner of the competition, but John learned a lot of new stuff and gained more than 50% RSS readers, which will inflate his earnings for the month.

This competition didn’t have enough rules. If the rules were to use only the blog to promote the RSS, I think John could have been the winner. John Chow is an expert in blogging while Shoemoney isn’t exploiting it as much as he could. Shoe even said he’s not an expert on that.

Anyway check the chart:

I will publish a long post on how to create this kind of charts soon. Leave a comment if you want to see it sooner.

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Check this chart to see graphically what happened:

don’t forget to subscribe to my blog and to check the table on the right sidebar.

It’s not that difficult to create charts and they create an added value to any post. I’ll probably publish some instructions on how to create a nice chart if I get enough feedback (where enough >= 1) .

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