Roll your own “___-aholic.com” with EditGrid’s dynamic images feature
We’re busy expanding: headcounts, office space, etc. But delivering a better EditGrid remains the top priority around here. Ladies and gentlemen: July 2007 release is out!
The July release was primarily a bug hunt campaign. Our team devoted much effort to fine tuning and polishing our system in order to give you the best possible experience using EditGrid. More than 100 bugs are fixed. On top of that, we’d like to spotlight a new feature we think you’ll like: Dynamic Images.
From now on, you can use cell formulas and references to generate the URLs of your images. When you change the values of the referenced cells, the URL and hence the image will be updated dynamically, and this makes parameterizing an image possible.
Let’s take a look at some interesting examples.
Stockaholic
If you recall Alexaholic (now Statsaholic) you’ll know how mashing-up images can work like a charm. Alexaholic mashed-up charts from Alexa to create an integrated report comparing popularity ranking of the submitted sites. It essentially functioned as a very nice mash-up tool for comparing different web sites with one another.
This same idea has inspired the examples of EditGrid’s dynamic images in action below.
Check out the Stockaholic spreadsheet. Does it look familiar? Well, yes. Now type in one to five stocks symbols (say, MSFT and GOOG) in the space provided. Immediately you will see the stock chart get updated, and it shows you how GOOG outperformed MSFT in the past few months.
Stockaholic - formulate the actual URL from the input parameters and load the chart
How does it work? We simply concatenate a bunch of input parameters to construct a URL that creates our stock chart over at YAHOO! Finance. The stock chart will be reloaded whenever our input is updated, hence the name “Dynamic Images”.
Weatherholic
How about a more complex example? Check out the Weatherholic spreadsheet as well. This is another demo of how mash-ups can make creative use of online resources. Type in a city name (the demo currently offers only a few choices of cities), the sheet will then generate a report of the current and forecast weather of the respective city, including a satellite image, a pressure diagram plus a rainfall/temperature map of the nearby area fetched from BBC Weather and t7online.com. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Weatherholic - use Remote Data and Dynamic Image to load weather charts
Again, this example makes use of dynamic images, which their URLs are built from user input. The Weatherholic spreadsheet also uses Remote Data - the RSS of the weather of the cities is loaded regularly from YAHOO! NEWS Weather and the URL of the weather icon is then fed to a dynamic image to be displayed in the report.
Now it’s your turn.
We’ve worked to make EditGrid more than just a spreadsheet, and we’d like to see what creative uses you can do with it. It’s up to you and your imagination to combine these functionalities into practical yet extraordinary ideas, and be sure to publish your spreadsheet when your great work is done!
July 29th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
some documentation on how to specify a dynamic URL would be helpful!
July 29th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
It will depends on the context. For instance, if you go to Yahoo! Finance and try to generate a chart comparing share price of Apple (AAPL) v. Microsoft (MSFT), you will notice that the URL of the generated image looks like this:
http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=AAPL&t=1d&q=l&l=on&z=m&c=MSFT&a=v&p=s
Substituting the stock quotes AAPL and MSFT in the URL, as well as further customising the other parameters (eg “3m”, for three months, instead of the default “1d”, for one day) will give you the result you want.
The same principle goes for other web service providers — it depends on whether the WS provider takes in parameter through an URL and how the URL is crafted and most often than not the URL scheme is different on a case-by-case basis.
July 29th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
That is not what I meant!
As far as I can see, there is only provision (as previously) for entering or editing a static URL into an image link. Where does the dynamically built URL go?
July 29th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
PK:
I finally worked it out from your “Weatherholic” example.
The problem was, I didn’t right click the “edit url” (and therefore see the cell reference that was way off to the right - cell AD5 for instance).
I had only clicked the “get objects permalink” and seen the “static” URL that held the CURRENT image identifier.
You really do need some specific instructions saying that the URL can be a cell reference (I suggest you put it at “point of use” in the edit window
“Please enter image URL or cell reference to a URL”
- also some instructions in the WIKI might be useful as I also tried to find out how to do it there - without success).
Ken
July 14th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
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