Try to say that 5 times really fast. Go ahead, try it. Well, at least it is not as difficult as Fox in Socks – man that book is a killer.
This WAW is basically a means to embed Wolfram Alpha queries into a webpage. Pretty cool idea, but I am not sure how well it does the job. In fact, I have tried to embed calculations in my posts before. So, how about I just give a quick review of some different ways to do this. For all these methods, I will put in a calculator to determine the density of something given its mass and volume.
Javascript version
Density calculator
Enter the mass: kg
Enter the volume:m 3
Density =
What is good about this? First, it is all contained in this page. There are no popups or anything like that. It doesn’t depend on the user having to log into anything else. It is fully customizable by me – if I wanted, I could even add pull down menus for different units and stuff.
What is not to like? Well, I don’t like writing javascript code. Maybe if I do this often enough, it wouldn’t be so bad. Also, for simple stuff, it is pretty straight forward – but what about crazy complicated stuff? Note: I am not a javascript expert by any means.
I have used this one before. The basic idea is to put the calculation into either a google doc or in a Zoho spreadsheet. I will use both below.
I really thought one could embed an editable google docs spreadsheet. Why can’t you? WHY? Oh well, here is the webpage version that you can edit – but that kind of ruins the whole point.
I wish the zoho doc could be set to edit on load instead of having to click that edit button. Also, my brother claims that this doesn’t work in Safari if you have cookies disabled or something like that. Other than that, the embeddable spreadsheet thing seems like a good idea. Too bad it doesn’t work just the way I like it.
Wolfram Alpha Widget
Here is the applet I made from Wolfram Alpha.
Yes, this is pretty simple – but it returns lots of cool info. I am not sure if this form is still the best. However, maybe this is better than the other two. I haven’t made up my mind yet. What about a more difficult test? Here is a calculation from my flying R2-D2 post. I found an expression for the mass of R2 as:
Can I use Wolfram Alpha to make a widget for this?
That seems to work. Also, in this version I included the units in the input box. Why not – right? Wolfram Alpha interprets that stuff anyway. No need for me to go through the trouble of making in a pop-up menu.
But, what do you think? Are there any other good alternatives for embedding calculations?
