As a long-time fan and follower of Edward Tufte, information design Guru, I ran across Sparklines again. Described as ‘Intense, Simple, Word-sized graphics’ often appearing in-line with descriptive text. What caught my eye this time was a link to a Sparklines PHP module that allows the easy inclusion of these documents into websites. Perhaps the best implementation can be seen on the information aesthetics site.

I am investigating including these in-line graphics to support user and usage reports for CCGB systems and services. Though much of the projected data will be in a tabular format, in-line graphics such as these would be useful to display trend data. Disk space consumed per user, jobs submitted to the SGE cluster queues, hours connected to systems, etc.

For the moment, I’ve added the SparkStats WordPress module to track posts and commentary on this blog. It appears in the right column, just beneath the Search text field, currently with little to now explanation.

There is even a Sparklines graph library for Ruby, my new language.

Update: Check out Andreas Flockermann’s sparkline implementation for Excel. The gallery contains several impressive variations on sparklines and dynamic systems for Excel and Server dashboard displays.