Every blog owner, especially beginner blogger, is keen on statistics – "How many people visited my blog today?", "How many visitors reached my last post?", etc. And there comes time when your stats are already good enough and you want to share them with others, for example to promote your blog or just to decorate it. How to publish statistics to your blog so that they look nice and you don't spend much time creating a chart? Use a professional software for creating flash charts. For example, Animated Chart. Why this charting software is handy for me? First, the data can be imported from Microsoft Excel or text file. That means when I want to show a piece of my data from Google Analytics, I don't have to retype data manually. I simply export data from Analytics to CSV file and then import them to Animated Chart. So, entering data for a month takes me less than a minute. Then, the graph can be customized. Everything from color and font to axis scaling is user definable. And the most important setting is chart size. Animated Chart lets me create both full-sized charts like the one you see below and small charts for sidebars.
Also, if your programming skills are above intermediate, you can make dynamic blog visitors chart as well. Animated Chart Professional edition can generate live chart data from an XML file. As Google Analytics allows exporting data to XML, you can create a dynamic XML file data from which will be displayed on your web chart in real time.
Flash chart with your blog visitors stats can be embedded to blog as well as any other flash object. All you need is just to paste an HTML code into your blog post HTML and insert a URL of swf chart. To place chart on a sidebar (for Blogger), add a new gadget (HTML/JavaScript) to your page elements (Dashboard | Layout | Page Elements) and paste the code to the gadget editor. Easy, quick, nice.
P.S. I told about blog visitors statistic only, but you can obviously create flash graphs for whatever data – for instance, the views of your most popular posts, time spent on a page and anything else.
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