Last time I was writing on my blog I was basically unemployed. After
I’ve found a job ( waay away from home) I stopped writing for a while.
I was too busy organizing my life and trying to figure out how to feel
less lonely here. I always had thoughts on my mind, some I would have
loved to share, some not. What I usually had on my mind where great
ideas, at least that’s what they seemed to me, but too big or
cumbersome to be done by myself alone. Even now I have some big thing
I’d like to develop.

ooh. it’s very hard to order thoughts on a piece of (virtual) paper. I
should start again to write more often.

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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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