Sparks! A Mint Plug-in to Generate Sparklines · 195 words posted 09/13/2005 07:24 PM
Edward Tufte calls Sparklines:
small, high-resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images. Sparklines are data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.
Colby Makowsky and I have written a Sparklines Pepper plug-in for
Mint, Shaun Inman’s web statistics package. With four small images you can now get a snapshot of your site’s activity trends.
Sparks! is built on top of James Byers’s Sparkline PHP Graphing Library.
Right now, the implementation is very simple: you can choose between a bar chart and a line graph to show data over four time periods (hours, days, weeks, and months). There aren’t any data points listed in each sparkline yet, but we can add them based on your feedback.
Download Sparks! from Colby’s site, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.
UPDATE 09.14.05 4:00PM EST
One user has reported that he cannot generate the Sparklines on his server. The Sparklines library requires that you have the GD library installed as a PHP module. I’ve included a utility page in the Sparks! download to help you check whether your server meets the requirements; please see “Troubleshooting Sparks! Pepper” in the READ ME file in the download for help troubleshooting.
* * *
2. On Sep 21, 09:57 AM Philipp Daun said:
Is there any way to make the background of the sparklines transparent? or is it intended to be white? Anyway, beautiful plugin! #
1. On Sep 14, 03:14 PM Rod Begbie said:
Lovely. So much more useful than those collosal ugly bar charts generated by awstats. #