Google has a new tool (at least I haven’t come across it before) which allows you to generate PNG images of charts simply by providing a URL with certain parameters.

The Google Chart API allows you to generate a range of different graph styles; line charts, bar charts, pie charts, Venn diagrams and scatter graphs.

You can also format them with a range of different colours and styles.

In the past I’ve used a variety of methods for producing charts for web pages; individual .gifs stretched to create bar charts, Flash charts to give more interactivity, and of course the least dynamic and most time consuming method of producing them in Illustrator.

The Google API gives an easy solution for creating simple charts, which will be more than sufficient for a number of projects. There’s no need for an API key, so setup is a breeze. There’s also a comprehensive developer’s guide which gives you examples of all of the types of charts you can make.

If you’re looking for a solution to produce charts for your site, then I’d say this is a good starting point.

This is just a quick letter to say that I am finally starting to “get” what you’re all about.

It’s taken me a while to really understand what all the fuss was about, but I am finally starting to realise how great you are. Where else could I dig up old videos of my favourite football hero scoring goals that’ll probably never be seen on TV again, find interviews with a local 70s rock star that I have an unhealthy comedic obsession with, or discover rare footage of Prince, Michael Jackson and James Brown sharing the same stage?

Just to nit pick slightly though – I do appreciate it must give you a headache worrying about all the legal issues, not to mention the huge bandwidth bill, but do not overlook the small details – please please please could you fix the tabbing order on your search form? I can’t count the number of times I’ve entered a search term, tabbed and hit enter, only to find I’m triggering the home link on the logo.
It only requires a very small change to your HTML, but that would no doubt save many people from my same annoyance.

Faithfully yours,

R x

Domain name registrar 123-Reg has a fairly unique set of error messages which show an unusual amount of personality. Amongst the errors I have received this morning are:

The server is currently in an intergalactic battle to take control of the universe from the evil emporer. He will be back later.

The page you requested is stuck in a traffic jam, please try again shortly.

The page you requested is currently unavailable. Our server is currently on the telephone, please try again shortly.

The page you requested is currently unavailable. Our server has popped out for a bite to eat, please try again shortly.

The page you requested is currently engaged, please try again shortly.

Of course, these lighthearted messages can become a little grating if you see them repeatedly and the problem doesn’t get fixed. It would also be nice to have a little technical detail about the nature of the problem, to give an general idea of what is really going wrong.

A small thumbnail of the site is shown in Jason Walsh’s article, “Design tips that hit the mark“, under a section named “inspiration”:

It’s amazing what can be done with blogging software. Online literary magazine The Beat has squeezed and shoved Moveable Type until they came up with this fresh and professional-looking webzine.

Unfortunately, there’s no head-enlargening naming of yours truly in the magazine, and the details about the site are incorrect (the site is based on Wordpress, not Moveable Type, and it wasn’t shoved, it was gently caressed!), but it’s great to see some of my work being showcased like this.

.net was a magazine I used to read pretty much every month a few years ago (along with Internet Magazine, which I think eventually merged with .net), but I suspect like other readers, I was finding that most of the information it featured could be found on the web for free.

I guess the magazine industry as a whole is under a lot of pressure from the web, and it must be difficult to compete when there is so much information being passed around for nothing.

But .net appears to have recently undergone a bit of a renaissance (and a redesign), through bringing onboard the likes of Andy Budd, Andy Clarke and Molly Holzschlag as their advisory panel, looking at web standards more and perhaps taking more of a professional approach to web design (rather than writing for amateur designers).

It’s certainly now back on my radar, and not simply because it has featured my work!

This month’s issue also has the added bonus of coming with a mini Sitepoint CSS Anthology book, which, along with the mention for The Beat, goes someway to justifying me spending the whopping £5.99 on the magazine.

On the stats side, I look at the number of hits for the day, and the monthly total, which are all pulled (via Javascript at the moment, but I’m looking to change to XML feeds from each site), from a home-brewed stats script that I knocked up in PHP, and is installed locally on each domain. It’s far from perfect, but it does give me what I think I want – a snapshot of activity, rather than having to delve into an over-whelming set of stats that a package such as Google Analytics might give me (that I’ve actually ended up checking about once every couple of weeks). If required, links from the dashboard allow me to easily look deeper into the stats at each site.

With the incoming referrals covered by my own stats scripts, I also have stats showing the outgoing clicks, thanks to MyBlogLog, which provides me with the top 5 outward links. I’m too stingy to upgrade to a pro account which would give me more than the top 5. I’m too busy to write my own script to do the same thing for nothing.

To remind me how few people read my blogs, I also use the FeedBurner “chicklets” – images that update every so often showing the number of readers of your RSS feed.

As well as the stats, I also have some nice little graphs, courtesy of TrendMapper. I don’t fully understand what they’re telling me, but by and large they all appear to be growing at a steady rate, which is fine by me. Once they are on the decline, I will begin to panic.

Stats such as Adsense earnings and emails in my GMail inbox are handled by Firefox extensions, although I guess these could also be built into the dashboard, for access from any computer with internet access.

My dashboard gives me a one-page view of all that is happening on my sites, but I’m intrigued to know if I’m missing out on something. Do you have a web dashboard too? If so, what’s on it?

I’ve just been thinking about the error reporting in Wordpress, prompted by flicking through 37signal’s Defensive Design For the Web.

Although Wordpress comes with a customisable template for the more common 404 errors, there may also be the odd occasion when a visitor receives a database connection error. These errors are usually handled by a standard WordPress error message, which details the problem and suggests a visit to the Wordpress Support Forums.

Although this is probably fine for the webmaster, it’s pretty useless to your visitors,as they’re not in a position to do anything about it.

So next time your database dies under the pressure of all your traffic (or in my case, loses a database connection because of a dodgy host), why not supply your visitors with a friendlier message, explaining that there has been a problem, that you’re working on it, and if applicable, a phone number, other contact details etc.?

How to configure the friendlier messages

In order to replace the standard message, you need to have a dig around in your Wordpress includes directory. In the wp-db.php file, there’s the bail() function (probably towards the bottom of the file). You can easily alter the HTML in here as you wish.

Rather than telling the visitor exactly what the problem is (which will probably confuse them anyway), I decided to take the $message variable output (which outputs the nature of the error), and put it into a mail() function to send me the error message in an email.

I’ve only implemented this in the most recent verion of WordPress (2.0), although I think it’s probably the same for previous versions. Also, it’s worth remembering that as this is a hack to a core WordPress file, you should document this fact somewhere, as it may get over-written at the next WordPress upgrade. If anyone knows a way that this could be built into a plugin, please let me know.

If you’ve ever tried to open a scanned image of a bank note in Photoshop, then you too may have noticed the warning about opening bank note images in the application. There must be some clever image analysis going on behind the scenes to detect the fact it is a tenner or fiver you’re trying to meddle with. Anyone have any idea how this is done? Not because I’m up to anything dodgy of course, I’m just curious about these types of thing.

The warning points you in the direction of the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group for more information:

A counterfeit deterrence system (CDS) has been developed by the CBCDG to deter the use of personal computers, digital imaging equipment and software in the counterfeiting of banknotes. The CDS has been voluntarily adopted by several hardware and software manufacturers, and prevents personal computers and digital imaging tools from capturing or reproducing the image of a protected banknote.

It just goes to show how much time and thought goes into developing the programmes we take for granted.

Of course, if you were wanting to do something dodgy with the scanned images, you could just open them in Fireworks.

Myself and little cuz Joe have recently started work on a new site for him (replacing the often neglected Homiesheaven), and along the way I seem to have finally converted him to the joys of Firefox.

“that was the quickest and easiest install EVER!.. How many tabs can I have open at the same time?! Wow!”*

So that’s a good start. But Joe, Firefox has a lot more to offer, the major benefit being the extensions you can add to it which make Firefox so much more than just a web browser.

Here, in no particular order, are the extensions that I currently use – am I missing any gems that I’d find useful?

• DOM Inspector – installed as standard in Firefox, this extension can be used to inspect and edit the Document Object Model of any web document. Rarely use this at the moment, to be honest.
• HTML Validator – invaluable for checking that code validates, and for help with fixing errors in HTML.
• ColorZilla – find the colour from any part of a web document – useful for helping remember what colour you’ve chosen for a certain part of a website, or just for finding the HEX value of a colour you like.
• Tabbrower Preferences – take full control of your tabs.
• Web Developer Toolbar – the absolute king of Firefox extensions. No web developer should be without it, as there’s nothing better for helping tweak your pages and deconstructing other websites. No surprise it generally comes bundled in the Firefox installation.
• Google PageRank – I know, PageRank is effectively dead, but there’s still something reassuring about seeing that little green bar pop up when viewing a site.
• Greasemonkey – another under-used extension, which allows you to alter the behaviour of certain websites (assign them “user scripts”).
• Customize Google – adds links to other search results on Google’s search results pages, plus a whole lot more gubbins which is mainly used by those that think giving all your data to Google is a crime. This extension is currently “up for eviction” frankly, because it doesn’t add much value.
• MeasureIt – a new addition; where I previously used ScreenCalipers to measure objects on screen, I now have MeasureIt, which is much handier and quicker to use.
• SessionSaver – another new addition, but this looks like it’s going to be invaluable for getting back to pages that have been closed by accident or from a browser crash.
• SpellBound – checks spelling in web forms. Must remember to use it more when blogging.
• Screen Grab – great plugin for taking screenshots of entire web pages. Requires JAva to run.
• Fasterfox – allows you to tweak Firefox for better performance.
• IE Tab – see how your design looks in Internet Explorere without having to open it.
• Adsense Notifier – here’s one for stats junkies – if you find yourself logging in to your Adsense account regularly, this extension will show your clicks and earnings in your Firefox taskbar, and will update as regularly as you wish.

So there you go, hopefully both you and Joe will have found something that will be useful to you in that list.

* Or words to that effect.

Nice to see MSN making a great effort to promote this event with some brilliant creative themselves:

Nothing says creativity like a poorly constructed image which has been badly optimized. It looks like the sort of thing I’d come up with.

One of the points raised in the comments was that it is difficult for the user to tell whether a link opens a new window or not. This is probably something we all have encountered. How many times have we got to the end of a form, to find that we must agree to some terms and conditions for which we have to click a link to view – Does that link open a new window? Will I lose all the data I’ve entered if I press it? These days, most of these sorts of links do open some sort of pop-up or a new window, but for novice web users this might not be obvious, and even experienced web users can be left in some doubt.

In Roger’s comments I suggested that there could be a change in the cursor when you hover a link that opens a new window. As he rightly points out in response, this would only be a visual clue to those using a mouse to browse the site in question – any indication of this sort should be device independent. Although I whole hartedly agree that we should strive for device independence wherever possible, is there much harm in trying to improve the browsing experience for some visitors?

When I suggested changing the mouse icon for new window links I was thinking that it could be something that browser makes could build in themselves, although there are many ways to open new windows, so it might be best left up to website designers to choose – the CSS2 specification allows for various types of cursor, including site specific cursors which are called through a URI. With the recent release of Firefox 1.5, support has been added for custom cursors, and although caution should be urged that designers do not go over-the-top and confuse visitors even more, this may mean we see more and more feedback given to the visitor via the mouse cursor.

If you’re viewing this post in Firefox 1.5, this link should have a slightly different cursor. OK, so if you were actually doing this for real you’d spend smore more time designing your cursor than I did.

The syntax for specifying a custom cursor like this is:

A .gif file seems to work fine, although the CSS2 spec seems to suggest you should use the proper cursor file type (.csr). You should also specify a default pointer in case the browser in question can’t cope with the URL. Obviously you could use javascript to run through all the links to new windows on the page an to attach the appropriate class name on the fly.

Only tested in Firefox 1.5 on Windows so far, I’m afraid.