As readers likely know putting your data online as interactive visualizations can be a lot of work. We like to use D3, Highcharts and the Google visualization API but all of these tools require some serious programming. When you’re building a website with custom data visualization the effort might make sense, but when you have data you want to share quickly and elegantly a new data visualiation tool, Plot.ly, is a nice option. You can create graphics by uploading data and manually setting plot options or you can create and upload directly from Python, R or other environments.
Here I show a quick example using the Plot.ly API for the R package ggplot2. I am assuming you have already signed up for a free account and have a username and API key.
- Install the Plot.ly package and dependencies
- Create your ggplot2 graphics
- Send to Plot.ly
- Not everything went smoothly
- Summary