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Comment by Colliwinks | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed that their 'huge revelation' was that perhaps they shouldn't be doing huge amounts of dynamic image generation client side.

Is the point of this article "we managed to get charts into email"? In places there is a bit too much subjective self-praise for anything other than a sales pitch: "...elegant, beautiful, and timely..." I personally think their greyscale and doughnut charts don't look great.

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Absolutely agree. Doughnut charts add nothing but a distraction layer.

I would even go further to say that majority of this dashboard is meaningless, just noise. What it lacks is the Why's.. For instance, "Total Page Views" has dropped by 35% in comparison to the previous 4 weeks... why?

The doughnut chart can be reduced to a series of bullet points with a comparative sparkline to identify the main points of change.

/rant

Please don't post comments like this. It adds no value and it violates the HN guidelines, since no one who isn't a jerk would say this to someone's face when they were showing their work. You would simply keep it to yourself.

I would argue your post and its tone - "no one who isn't a jerk would say this" - is far more offensive than pointing out that getting charts into email isn't exactly a massive victory for mankind. Pointing out that this post is also self-promotion doesn't hurt either given we see tons of extremely thin blog posts make it to the front page here which are basically adverts for the company of the blogger.

"no one who isn't a jerk would say this to someone's face when they were showing their work."

That's just your opinion, and in my opinion you are being far more offensive than Colliwinks by calling him a jerk on a public forum.

On the contrary, my assumption is that Colliwinks is not a jerk and would never have said that in person, and therefore broke the guidelines (presumably unintentionally) by saying it here. That's why I said "to someone's face" - it's the most important part.

If you go and look for such a thing as a server-side 2D rendering API that will work on a headless linux server and support a nice visualization API comparable to D3 and not pay someone several thousand dollars for a license, you will find that a headless browser that supports SVG is not such a terrible answer.

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