Technical Beef with the Line Graph

[dirtydiesel]

I have a minor concern for the site administrators regarding the vehicle profile FE graphs...

As you post more fill-ups, the scale of the monthly bar graphs changes to include additional months. What annoys me is that the time scale on the line graph does not change (there are a limited number of points) so you don't get to see all your fill-ups, just the most recent ones...

Would it be that difficult to incorporate a floating scale for the line graph to include all fill-ups...so you can do more accurate long-term benchmarking, by the fill up, not just by the month (as per the bar graph)? This would greatly help the identification of 'outlying fill-ups' over the long term (which are not picked up by the monthly graphs), helping members to better identify the driving habits that created these outliers, whether positive or negative.

Thanks...

[pb]

That's a good idea, dirtydiesel. In my perfect world I'd like to see graphs like those you find at Google Finance. (Here's The Dow graph.) You can interact with the data, select different time periods, and link to specific news stories (or fuel-ups in our case) that affect the data. Unfortunately, we're not Google and our graphing abilities are limited. But I agree that we could add some more graphs to show individual fuel-ups in the past, we just need to find a good way to present that data. A graph at the current size would get cramped very quickly with 20+ fuel-ups.

And it's not completely related, but Google does offer a Chart API. Moving all of our charts to their system might give us more room to expand in the future and that's something we're looking at.

[k1dude]

Agree. The charting on this site is very rudimentary. There are no additional charting options available to help evaluate your data. How can we see seasonal variations? How do we see improvement based on break-in? Not only should we be able to see the entire timeline of all recorded fill-ups, but we should be able to manipulate the variables (like date or introducing an average MPG line).