On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 5:44:58 PM UTC-5, Jon Orwant wrote: > > ... > > Its deprecation was announced back in 2012 > <https://developers.googleblog.com/2012/04/changes-to-deprecation-policies-and-api.html>, > > so in theory nobody should be using it now that it's 2019. > ... > Except for people who wrote code 10 years ago that has been nicely working since then. Finding that my daily System Statistics report stopped working yesterday was a complete surprise.
> There is no effective way to identify or contact users of the service > other than this group, so to alert them we will be creating outages: first > a short one, and then a longer one. > It would have been much nicer to put a watermark on every graph generated over the past year to let us know that this was coming instead of surprising us by suddenly turning it off. The short outage will be for an hour on *Wednesday, February 13, at > approximately 1pm Eastern Standard Time*. > The long outage will be for several hours on *Tuesday, March 5, at > approximately 10am Eastern Standard Time* > Oh, yeah, that helped. I read my System Status emails first thing in the morning, then I don't look at them again that day (unless there was a problem), so these outages were completely unnoticed. > If you are still using Google Image Charts, we recommend: > > > - > > Switching to Google Charts, an actively developed JavaScript library > for interactive charts and can render many common chart types as static > PNGs. > However, Google Image Charts provides some "charts" that Google Charts > does > not, such as QR codes, LaTeX equations, and road signs. For those we have > no suggested replacement. > - > > Using another charting library such as D3 <http://d3js.org> or Dygraphs > <http://dygraphs.com/> (both JavaScript). > - > > Generating all the charts you'll ever need before March 14 and storing > them yourself. (Many users of Google Image Charts create the same exact > chart over and over, which is slower and more wasteful than generating the > chart once and storing it locally.) > > The whole idea behind using Google Image Charts was that they could be sent out in emails. I cannot send out JavaScript in emails and expect it to work. I have code written in DCL on VAX/VMS, Alpha/OpenVMS and IA64/OpenVMS systems that send out daily reports showing disk file usage, these systems no nothing about JavaScript so I cannot use JavaScript on the server to generate static charts and send them out. I see below that someone created a site that I could use, but the company I work for won't pay a monthly fee just to send me a couple of dozen charts each morning. On a personal note, I've enjoyed maintaining the service over the years, > and I'm happy to have watched the much more powerful Google Charts leapfrog > it in capability > Thanks, for maintaining it. Please remember that "More powerful" does not equal better. In my particular case "More powerful" does not even equal "Usable." I see that the service is working this morning. If there is any way to keep it on to give us time to redevelop current software then that would be great. If you keep it on then consider putting on a watermark to let people who might be on vacation the past couple of days notice that you plan on turning this off again. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Chart API" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-chart-api. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
