Jekyll Simple Stats exploits Chart::Gnuplot

My own Raku application to create simple stats about how much do I blog on my Jekyll platform, named Jekyll Simple Stats, and implemented in Raku (aka Perl6), has grown a little more.

Since its inception, the script was a kind of giant wrapper to feed Gnuplot to genereta some raw histograms. In order to achieve that, I was producing during the process a few Comma Separated Values (CVS) and Gnuplot scripts to generate the images.

A few days ago I discovered Graph::Gnuplot, a module for Raku that handles all the machinery to make Gnuplot working without having to manually generate the data and the scripts. After a few problems with the installation{:target=”_blank”** and a few difficulties in understanding how to produce the in-memory dataset, I was able to get it running from my application.

The result was much more professional than the one I obtained by my scripts and, moreover, I don’t have to handle temporary files by myself.

And thanks to this much more integrated graph system, adding an option to my application to customize the color of the graphs was really easy!