QR Codes - Embrace!

Being away from my blog for some time (around 5 months) I felt like giving it some new life. Even I was bored with the old template which was filled with graphics and thought of going to a simpler standard one – and hence this dark theme which will load faster and... oh well, will at least save some power :)

Anyway getting back to the topic, seeing these 2D bar code around, I was enthusiastic to investigate more on them. Among the types like CM , PDF417, MaxiCode , DataGlyphs etc I was really interested in one category I have been seeing around quite often which encodes data in the form of squares.

This type I am talking about is officially known as QR Code (Quick Response). A code can store up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters of arbitrary text. Since it stores a bunch of characters, this text can be anything, ranging from a name, URL, contact information, or even a geeky way to represent of a short romantic poem! This has been mainly used in the Japanese automobile industry to track production line elements. But, today its utility has expanded to a broader scope and is being used to store different types of information in different domains - specially marketing.

Here’s my contact info in QR Code (basically ‘MY’ QR Code) :




As you would have already seen, my blog already has its own QR Code.

ZXing’s neat online utility to generate your own QR Code can be found at http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/

The google visualization API has all what you need to embed QR Codes in your web content. The chart API will show you all the options available. The following is the simplest form of getting what you need embedded.

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=WIDTHxHEIGHT&chl=YOUR DATA STRING" />

I already added the ‘QR Droid’ android app to my mobile and I am loving it already. This allows me to embed all sorts of info in QR Codes and also retrieve them pretty effectively.

Happy QR Coding!