Generate a heat-map of writing based on data from the Google Docs Writing Tracker. When implemented on a website, the results will look something like this:
- You must already be using the Google Docs Writing Tracker. This is the data source for the heatmap.
- You must have your own website, or a place where you can host the code that generates the heatmap.
- You must install the Cal-heatmap javascript module. The code is available on Github.
In order to be able to produce a heatmap of writing data, you need to publish the Google Docs Writing Tracker spreadsheet so that a script can access the data. You only need to publish the Writing tab.
- Publish the Writing sheet of your Google Docs Writing Tracker spreadsheet as a CSV file.
- Open your Google Docs Writing Tracker spreadsheet
- From the File menu, click Publish to the Web...
- Under the Link options, select just the Writing sheet.
- Select Comma-separated values (.csv)
- Copy the link provided for the published sheet.
- Copy the heatmap.php file to your website.
- Paste the URL from step 1 between the quotes in line 4:
$google_docs_writing_sheet = "URL from step 1 goes here"
- Copy heatmap.html to your website
- Update any references in the HTML file to where you installed the cal-heatmap library.
- Line 15 should point to the location of your heatmap.php file:
data: "http://yourwebsite.com/scripts/heatmap.php"
With that done, you should be able to go to the heatmap.html file and see the heatmap for your writing data.
For an example of this in action, check out my heatmap.