Basic Chartlet usage
Once you have installed the extension and restarted your browser, you should see a new in the toolbar.
If you click on the Chartlet icon in the toolbar, a window opens showing the installed chartlets
So far, you have not installed any chartlet, so the list is empty. Go to the chartlets page to pick a chartlet. Click on [Load chartlet] link of the chartlet page.
A new window opens giving some details on the chartlet you are about to install in your browser.
Click Install to install the chartlet in your browser.
It is important to understand that a chartlet won't capture any data if no data channel has been created. A channel gives a simple level of customization to define the actual data you are interested in. For instance, if you want the number of occurences of a given name in a news site, you will certainly create a channel for each name you are interested in. You can have any number of channels associated to a chartlet, but at least one for the chartlet to extract data.
Note that when you install a chartlet, it may already contain one or several channels, either as samples, or because the nature of this chartlet implies preset channels.
Click on the Create button in the Data channels section of the window. The channel window opens.
It is more than useful to provide a title and a description for the channel you just created. It is mandatory to fill in the fields of the Variables section. Those variables are defined in the chartlet itself and should embed a description to help users understand what input is expected from every variable. For instance, in a chartlet dedicated to getting the rank of a site from a search engine, it makes sense to have the query and the searched site as variables.
Click on the Done button to close the window and start collecting data.
The bad news here is that for a time chart to be meaningful, you have to collect data over some period of time. For now, we will generate an ugly flat chart, be patient and you will get nice graphics. Click on the Run button the chartlet window. This tells the chartlet to capture data now, regardless of the current schedule. In fact, you need to have at least 2 samples to be able to display a chart. So click Run a second time.
You might notice a little red rectangle at the very bottom-right of the browser. This indicates chartlet data are being downloaded. The corresponding line in the chartlets window also gets red.
On the chartlet window, click on the View data button. This displays a new window with all captured data for each channel. In the channel frames, each line show a timestamp and the extracted value at that time.
Back to the chartlet window, click the View data button to open the chart details window.
It allows you to select:
- what channels you want to display on the chart
- the period covered by the chart
- the length of each unit on the time axis
- the type of the chart
Once the chart has been configured, the Quick view button allows to bypass the chart settings window and displays the chart directly.
You now have to simply click the View button to display the chart.
You may want to export your chart so that it can be accessible directly form the Web to anyone not having installed Chartlet. To do so, click on the Export button at the bottom right of the chart window. It opens the export window.
Make sure you fill appropriately the fields in this window so that people looking at the chart knows what it represents. Click on Save to save the chart to the server. You can copy the displayed url to access this chart directly.
Note that as long as you export the same channels from the same chartlet, the fields keep their value and the chart url remains the same, so it's is easy to maintain a chart for everyone to see, with simply 2 additional clicks.