With the introduction of its Charting API, Google has made it easier to publish charts online.

The service uses a specially formatted url placed in a standard html img tag. The data in the url is used by Google’s servers to create chart images on the fly. Chart types include:

• Line charts
• Bar charts
• Pie charts
• Venn diagrams
• Scatter plots

For experimentation, and for ad-hoc chart production, Dion Almaer has created a useful Chart Tool, that takes your source data and builds a suitable chart url.

Chart Maker - Generator for the Chart Server API via kwout

Developers wishing to automate the production of charts from dynamic data sets can use the API documentation to explore the full range of possibilities.

Developer’s Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code via kwout

This API is open to a broad range of applications from presenting market trends, through price comparisons to log analysis and social network statistics. The daily limit of 50,000 queries makes this suitable for small or medium sites, or for larger sites if an image cache is used.

For smaller sites on shared hosts important benefits are the reductions in bandwidth and cpu load, as the images are constructed and served off-site. This helps keep hosting costs down while increasing the likelihood of surviving a popular Digg.