Google Chart API

It’s almost two days ago that Google released their Chart API, the result of a 20% time project in Zürich, created for internal use at Google at first, and now released to the public. This API basically let’s you create a URL, with which you can make a chart, all sorts of charts actually, have a look:

There’s quite a few advantages to having a Google API for this:

• You don’t have to write graph stuff yourself, or implement big packages.
• Your server doesn’t have to serve and create these graphs, which saves a LOT of load.
• It saves you from having to employ some caching solution as well.

I’ve been playing quite a bit with this API since I read about it yesterday, on my site I have a quite popular FeedBurner graphing tool, which creates a graph of your FeedBurner readers over a certain period of time, I’m now rebuilding that tool to work with this API, as that’s probably a lot faster, the first results are already here:

There’s only one disadvantage to this API, you can only do 50,000 queries a day, which seems like a lot, but if you’re showing 5 images in a post, like I am here, that would allow for only 10,000 readers a day. The docs for the API are quite good, so go forth and play with it!