Sciolism Rocks

I’ve managed to read through the API specification and have generated a script to encode a row of data into Google’s format.

If you click here, you’ll get to see the following graph:

The big deal is that the chart isn’t an image stored somewhere. It’s actually generated by Google using the URL. Here’s the URL that generated the chart above:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=500x300&chd=s:teU8jZZcpQxNMQ,QLaUURhRV81JL
&cht=bvg&?chxt=x,y&chxr=0,1,14|1,0,42&chdl=Lee|Meg&chco=cc0000,00aa00&chbh=9,1

Notice the bit that’s in boldface. That’s the encoded data for the chart. Copy this link into your browser’s address bar, change a couple of those letters, and submit it. You’ll get a different chart.

Here’s another chart showing the progression of the game.

If you View Source on this page, you’ll notice that all the <img> tags point to these Google chart URLs. They don’t point to images. That is, these URLs can be embedded in <img> tags and used as if they were PNG images.