I’ve just finished a new webpage called PeoplePerHour Economy that was written about in the mainstream tech press (see bottom half of article):
Technical details:
- The charts and graphs are implemented using the Google Charts API – a simple and extremely efficient method of producing charts.
- The charts (and chart data) are cached over a 24 hour period to take some load off the webserver. The caching is done by some simple PHP code – memcached seemed overkill.
- The UK map is implemented using a 3rd-party image map with polygon co-ordinates specifying each county. The hover-over highlighting is done using a JQuery plugin called mapHighlight.
- The “Job-o-meter” is implemented using a JQuery plugin called jOdometer customised to format the number with commas and animate the digits with some easing. I have made the customisations available via a github fork.
