17 October 2009
After much delay, possibly due to government meddling, Google Street View finally went live in select Canadian cities last week! Most of the GTA is covered, along with Kitchener/Waterloo, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Calgary and Vancouver. This likely ensures coverage for a majority of Canada’s population, if only a very small minority of its geographical area.
This is a welcome move, since street view has been available for our neighbours to the south for the past two years.
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6 November 2008
The Google Chart API is a great way to dynamically create chart and graph images for any non-static data you might want to display to your visitors, such as stats for a runner’s training log.
Although you can use your own server-side solution for generating charts, using PHP’s GD Image Processing Library or even a fancy chart library like pChart, this can increase the drain on your server’s resources. Client-side solutions that utilize the canvas element and jQuery or Flash can be very nice and easy to use, but may slow down the browser if there are a lot of charts.
Google Charts offers a nice trade-off; by using their service you offload the processing and bandwidth and get back a simple PNG image, but you must learn to use the API. Additionally, there’s also the risk that the service may throttle you, even if there’s no current usage limit.
Problems specifying Axis Ranges – Data points are not changed!
The API for Google Charts essentially consists of passing different query string parameters and their values and getting back a PNG-format image. As a result of this, passing in parameters is a bit quirky, and information in the API guide is a bit sketchy in this respect.
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