Google recently made public their
chart creation api. Very simple, very cool. The idea is that you specify chart data and settings in a url, and get back a generated image.
I wrote a little code that renders sparklines-like graphs using the google charts api, from TWiki. In my case I call the code from one of my plugins - but I'm probably the only person on the planet that uses that plugin, so you would need to call it from somewhere else.
The basic idea is simple: create the simplest, smallest legible line graph for a set of data. Small enough that it can serve as just another 'word' in a sentence, yet convey a relatively large set of quantitative information.
My approach was to invent some wiki syntax: ((sparkline)(number1, ..., numberk)), e.g. ((sparkline)(1500.0,700,1244,400,800.0,1921.5,2100.2,500,900,600,800,1000,1921.5,2100.2,500,900,600,800,1000)). This gets rendered as
shown in this example. It's all fairly easy.
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