Bluyah Development Blog

We’ve been working on this feature for over a month now an can finally announce (with a slight lump in our throats - and a sigh of relief) that Bluyah support for Google Docs is finally live.

Great - but what does that do for me?

At it’s most-basic, Google Docs support will allow you to tap into the spreadsheets you’re already storing in Google Docs and do things with the data that you were never able to do before.  Take for example our “Pizza Places in Fremont” demo from late last month.   When I put together the Google Map showing the location of each pizza parlor, the data was being pulled from a MySQL database set up on a personal server.  It’s a great set-up to demonstrate a point - but a little impractical to manage on a day-to-day basis (considering that I’m doing all of the SQL inputs manually).

Now that Bluyah supports Google Docs that has all changed.  Let me explain.

 Spreadsheet, spreadsheet - who’s got a spreadsheet.

Let’s face it - spreadsheets are how the majority of American businesses track their business-critical metrics.  We may have the priciest, high-availability database farm in existence.  But when we need to quickly crunch some random numbers, we instinctively reach for our trusty spreadsheet.  

Professionally, I track everything from project estimates for clients to PTO balance forecasts for employees.  Personally, I have a spreadsheet to track the number of miles and calories burned each time I’m on the eliptical machine, a spreadsheet to track when each of my eldest son’s book reports are due -  I even have a spreadsheet to track applications I want our company to develop.  The point is: spreadsheets are ubiquitous.  We’re collectively brain-dumping a whole lot of information into them and now - with the help of Bluyah - we can get some of that information back out in a meaningful way.

What was that about pizza, again?

So back to my list of pizza parlors in Fremont.  The spreadsheet was already in existence.  I had created it a couple of months ago.  And it was already in Google Docs.  I’d post the link here - but the spreadsheet is ‘private’ (I’ll write more about how to make ‘public’ specific columns in a ‘private’ spreadsheet later….)

I had all of the information I wanted - I just wanted to access that information in a more intuitive way : via a map.  With Bluyah, because map exports are already part of the application I didn’t have to do anything special.  All I had to do was set up my spreadsheet in such a way that it could be reported upon - then build a map based upon my report.

Sounds hard - how long did that take you?

Being the kind of person I am, I decided to find out.  I was going to time myself.  From spreadsheet to live map - how long would that take?  (I wont’ keep you hanging - it took less than two minutes.  A minute and forty-seven seconds to be exact!).  Here’s how that approximate two minutes was spent:

1. Create a new Google Docs connector.  This means click on “Connect” in the top menu, then “New Google Docs Connection” in the sub-menu.  The connector only requires a memorable name (or label) for your connector, your google docs email address and password (you can read more about why Bluyah requires email and password for fetching content “on-demand” when exports are rendered - and how Bluyah protects and encrypts this data  - by reading the Bluyah Privacy Policy).
2. Once the connection was established, I clicked on “List Spreadsheets” in the ‘Action’ column of the newly created connector.
3. This task listed all of the spreadsheets I had available for reporting against in my Google Docs account.  I selected my “pizza places” spreadsheet and clicked the link “Use in New Report”.
4. Since my spreadsheet had all of the columns named as I’d want them already, I didn’t change any of the column names when creating the report.  Nor did I change the column ordering.  But I did change the report title.  I liked “Pizza Parlors” better.  Has a nicer ring to it.
5. Saving the report, I had the following:
    http://admin.bluyah.com/export/html/a45557e0de1b012b6ee4002241319b39
6. Veriftying that the data looked solid, I then clicked the “Exports” link in the newly created report’s ‘Action’ column, then clicked ‘New Map’ in the sub-menu at the top of the page.
7. Creating the map was the hardest part.  I couldn’t decide between an orange map marker or a red map marker.  Finally, after about thirty seconds of deliberation I settled on orange.  I then set the size of the map to 400 by 300.
8. Since my spreadsheet contained street addresses (and not latitude/longitude information) I clicked the “Plot by Geocode” link to bring up the screen that allows me to map my data colums to the necessary ’street’, ‘city’, ’state’ and ‘zip’ fields.  Since the fields in my spreadsheet were similarly named, however, these mapping fields were pre-selected for me.   I didn’t need to do anything more than validate that they were there.
9. After that the only thing left to do was for me to decide which fields I wanted to display in the pop-up bubble on the map when users clicked on the map marker.  For my purposes, the pizza place’s name and phone number were the most important - so I placed them at the top of the list.  I added the address on just as a reminder.
10. Saving the map I was left with this:

NOTE: It probably took you longer to read the above description than it did for me to actually create the map.  I think you’ll find the same is true for you.  Once you start using Bluyah and you see how easy it is to go from “problem” to “problem solved” you’ll find more and more data sources you’ll want to export into charts, maps and marquees.

Let us know what data you’ve been mapping lately.

With version 0.4.4 of the code base we introduced Enhanced Maps which allow you to easily control the marker color and the contents of the “bubble” that displays when you click on the marker.  

With these new features, creating robust, data-driven maps become an extremely easy thing to pull off.

Case in point:

The USGS publishes an RSS feed that contains data on all of the earthquakes that have occurred over the past 30 days.   We went from feed to map in about 3 minutes by doing the following:

• I created a new Atom/RSS connector.  The input screen only required I give it a memorable name and input the feed’s URL.
• Once saved I clicked on the “Report” link for the newly established connector.  This brings up the Report Edit screen:

• On this page I changed the ‘pubDate’ column to ‘Reported’ and changed the ’summary’ column name to read ‘Earthquake’.  You change the column name by clicking on the name itself.  I also hid a couple of columns I didn’t need by clicking the [x] box in the upper-right of the column header.  
• Once I had saved the report (you can see the report in tabular format here - or as a CSV file here), I then clicked on the ‘Export’ link at the top of the screen, then the ‘New Map’ link and selected the newly created Report name.  The map edit screen has a few more configuration possibilities:

• Because the data elements ‘lat’ and ‘long’ already existed in the RSS feed, they were automatically selected as the fields to be used by ‘Latitude’ and ‘Longitude’.  (If my data set had contained street addresses instead, I would have clicked the ‘Plot by Geocode’ link instead )
• I only wanted the ‘Reported’ and ‘Earthquake’ columns from my report to show in the bubble that displays when a user clicks on a map marker, so I dragged them from the ‘Available Data’ box beneath the map, onto the bubble, and ordered them appropriately.
• Saving the map resulted in this: 

Let us know your thoughts.  Or better yet ~ create a map of your own and send us the link.  We’d like to see what you’ve done.

[UPDATE] A screencast of this tutorial can now be found here.