November 27, 2012

Tech question

I want to build a forecasting spreadsheet that I can embed in a website (such as here, Taki's, or VDARE) so that readers can input their own assumptions and get their own forecasts. I know how to build the spreadsheet, but I don't know how to make it interactive over the web. Any suggestions?

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

Use Perl.

Anonymous said...

Google docs has a spread sheet, but perhaps not sophisticated enough for you.

http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55244

Anonymous said...

Use Python.

Steve Sailer said...

Can I embed a Google docs spreadsheet on, say, my blog so that readers of my blog can input a few assumptions of their own and see what comes out?

Unknown said...

Yes

Embed a spreadsheet in a blog or webpage

Unknown said...

sorry already posted, delete my last comment pls

Orthodox said...

I've seen Mish Shedlock use Tableau.
http://www.tableausoftware.com/

Anonymous said...

Use Python.

Python is terrible. Use Ruby or Perl.

Anonymous said...

I have a team of programmers in India that will do this for you for a low low fee!

Watchmaker said...

Wolfram alpha has a fairly easy-to-use widget system. It's built for this sort of thing more than Google Docs.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/

I'm your only friend I'm not your only friend said...

Perl, Python, Ruby and in fact anything but JavaScript are server-side languages; using them you'd have to have server code that the browser could talk back and forth with (and I presume you don't have access to 'your' server). Browser-only code has to be JavaScript. Unfortunately I don't know of any offhand. Something like 'javascript spreadsheet' is what you'd probably want to look for. But, how much control do you have over your page anyway? /Can/ you embed arbitrary html + [script][/script] stuff? I'm thinking actually, that most of what you'll find will be organized into a few separate files, and thus require that you have access to the server itself (again) - you probably won't find JS organized so as to fit right on a single page, between [script] tags. (substitute square brackets for angle ones - blogger won't let me post the real thing). But y'know, server space isn't that expensive, < $10 month. But, probably the /work/ is more than you want to get involved in. Still I'm sure you have technically astute readers - put out a call, perhaps.

Anonymous said...

What is forecasting?

Anonymous said...

Hire Nate Silver.

Anonymous said...

Use Perl.

Also, get a time machine and go back to 1998. Really, perl for web page GUI programming?

Anonymous said...

Go with the Wolfram dealy on this... Considering your track record I doubt you will want to catch up on 15 years of HTML evolution any time soon, so if you're the quitting type just skip that & go straight to the Google Docs sheet, which sucks for the purpose of your ca. 1992 four-color climbing graphs but has a wide range of dumbed-down formula inputs usable with most any dataset. In fact put everything in the Google cloud, including your 401(k) and family heirlooms...

Anonymous said...

Zoho is also an option:

Embed Zoho Sheet

Geoff Matthews said...

This is another vote for Tableau. It's got a low learning curve, but has a lot of flexibility. It has a free option, and a great community online for figuring things out.

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

I've been using it for ~year, and it's pretty impressive. With the free version, you can publish your visuals online and link them to your website. The paid version allows for more security with the data, but that may not be important if you are dealing with public data.

TGGP said...

Hey, Python isn't so bad. It is server side though. And javascript is bad. Wish I didn't have to use it at work.

Curt said...

PM me and I'll have my people do it for you just for fun. It's what we do. - Curt