Working on SnapAds reports, I ran into the UI problem that the effects of colors (red, green, blue) in an advertisement were being graphed with random colors assigned by the graphing software (amcharts) -- very confusing! The real underlying problem was that the names of the colors are entered into the system by outside users. There is no way of knowing ahead of time if the thing being graphed is a color. Unless...

There are only so many words to describe colors. Could there be an 80% solution here? Indeed, I found Stoyan Stefanov had already written a color parser in javascript. I rewrote it quickly in Python so it could run server-side (amazing how closely those two languages can map to one another) and voila -- SnapAds reports now show a red bar if the thing being graphed is the effect of a red button.

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