I learned about Sparklines today through Brad Feld’s blog. Sparklines, as devised by Edward Tufte (of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint fame), are small, word-sized symbols and graphs that appear inline within your sentence. The goal is to increase the meaning of what your saying, in ways that words along just can’t. For example, you might see a tiny, 30-day graph for a certain stock beside the stock symbol itself in a newspaper, just to give you an idea of the stock’s trends over the last little while.

If you know PHP, you can add Sparklines to your website using the PHP Sparklines Graphing Library.

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