What is your favorite form of online entertainment?

[sbl_admin]

How do you spend your free time on the Internet? If you choose "Other," please tell us what you do online.

[joepole]

Pornography and the luring of minors across state lines for the purpose of sexual intercourse.

[AnimeSpirit]

I chose "other" because I also like writing PHP scripts on my spare time. It may sound a little nerdy, but I find it fun.

[rhertz]

Originally Posted by joepole

Pornography and the luring of minors across state lines for the purpose of sexual intercourse.

I enjoy your humor, but IMHO you might want to wrap that in [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] tags just to be safe. I know you are joking, but somone else may not.

[sassy1]

Definitely shopping. The convenience of not having to leave the home coupled with not having to interact with people if I choose not to...guess that sounds a bit antisocial - but true.

[BrainSmashR]

I'm with Anime on this one. The majority of my online time is spent tweaking various aspects of my website

[AnimeSpirit]

Yeah? What's your most complex script, Mr. Iframes? I'd like to see some of your code.

[BrainSmashR]

Define complex.

Is pulling live data from my database and displaying it in a gif signature image that refreshes every time you refresh the page what you would consider complex? I notice you don't have one.....

How about adding code to an existing script that pulls wapdata from BOINC servers and displays THAT data in a graphical image?


Now I'm not a master coder or even a professional by any stretch of the imagination, but don't let the fact that I use iframes fool you into thinking I don't have nearly a decade of experience running my own website, Anime....

[AnimeSpirit]

Originally Posted by BrainSmashR

Is pulling live data from my database and displaying it in a gif signature image that refreshes every time you refresh the page what you would consider complex? I notice you don't have one.....

Don't let the fact that I use iframes fool you into thinking I don't have nearly a decade of experience running my own website, Anime....

Actually, displaying dynamic data in a GIF is very simple. I don't use one on my site for 2 reasons: 1. None of my sites have data that change so drastically throughout the day; 2. Everytime someone views a page that has such a banner on it, it must query your database for the info in order to make it, which puts a huge strain on the server when you've got that banner displayed in 100+ places and people are hitting those pages 500+ times a day.

Don't get me wrong, dynamic banners a great idea, but it's better for your server's peformance to set a script that creates this image and updates it at specific times of the day instead of everytime the banner is loaded. Set a CRON job to run your banner update script once a day and that would probably be efficient enough and won't eat your server resources alive.

Here's a simple script I wrote a while back to write a text string to an existing graphic file.

PHP Code:

$string = "Some text";
$NewImage =imagecreatefromjpeg("pic.jpg");
$TextColor = imagecolorallocate($NewImage, 255, 255, 255);
imagestring($NewImage, 5, 20, 5, $string, $TextColor);
imagejpeg($NewImage); //Output image to browser or save to path 


It would be very simple to point this at an existing background image and query for some data to place in it.

If you want, let's jump to the computer forums and continue this. We can share code if you want. I've got some tricks you might like.

[sassy1]

you two are truly geeks.

[BrainSmashR]

Originally Posted by AnimeSpirit

Actually, displaying dynamic data in a GIF is very simple. I don't use one on my site for 2 reasons: 1. None of my sites have data that change so drastically throughout the day; 2. Everytime someone views a page that has such a banner on it, it must query your database for the info in order to make it, which puts a huge strain on the server when you've got that banner displayed in 100+ places and people are hitting those pages 500+ times a day.

Don't get me wrong, dynamic banners a great idea, but it's better for your server's peformance to set a script that creates this image and updates it at specific times of the day instead of everytime the banner is loaded. Set a CRON job to run your banner update script once a day and that would probably be efficient enough and won't eat your server resources alive.

Here's a simple script I wrote a while back to write a text string to an existing graphic file.

PHP Code:

$string = "Some text";
$NewImage =imagecreatefromjpeg("pic.jpg");
$TextColor = imagecolorallocate($NewImage, 255, 255, 255);
imagestring($NewImage, 5, 20, 5, $string, $TextColor);
imagejpeg($NewImage); //Output image to browser or save to path 


It would be very simple to point this at an existing background image and query for some data to place in it.

If you want, let's jump to the computer forums and continue this. We can share code if you want. I've got some tricks you might like.

Yes, I agree that's better for server performance, but I prefer current information, not something that is 24 (or more) hours old.

Note the differences in these two BOINC sigs.




Well I can't display a dynamic image without utilizing a rewrite in my htaccess file and I'm not gonna do that to show something you already know about, espically when it's data from another site, but my current Eienstein@Home credit is more than 200 points higher than the signature utilizing the method you described is showing.....and that's just 1 project.

[purpahurl]

Originally Posted by joepole

Pornography and the luring of minors across state lines for the purpose of sexual intercourse.

That's hilarious, you're not Mike Sieve are you?

[joepole]

Not anymore. Now I go by "Miguel Sanchez."

[Al Swearengen]

I love a good Mike Sieve joke...and Greg Frazier jokes too.

[piemaker720]

a good game of free cell