Is there any site that will rotate any image for you?

[Narz]

What I want to be able to upload multiple images to somewhere that will rotate them as the same filename (say http://thissiteshouldexist.com/dog.gif). You can add multiple pics of dogs & they will rotate & a user determined rate (every week, every month, etc.). This would be very cool for being able to set your avatar to change in advance.

Anyway know of any such site? If you start this site & do well you owe me 25%!

 

[GVBN]

Any web host that supports PHP will do. It won't work with avatars though

 

[againsttheflow]

Depends, do you want it 90 degrees to the right or left?

 

[Mise]

That's a pretty good idea Narzyboy. If you have the time and the inclination you can probably investigate doing it yourself (lots of free web-hosts out there, and you can create a very simple script to do the renaming via ftp).

However I'm not sure it would work for avatars, because I think the vB software actually downloads the picture onto CFC servers, rather than using the url every time.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Correct, it would not work for the avatars here. If you actually right click on an avatar and hit "View Image" you will see that the url is for cfc, not for the original host.

You could ask Till if its possible with a greasemonkey script. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=319173

 

[Mise]

The avatar's URL may be CFC, but that URL might simply be loading the image at the other end of the URL you tap into the user CP when you set your avatar. The real test is to actually try it, but it makes sense to store the image on CFC servers, in case the image gets deleted on the foreign server.

 

[Narz]

I will ask Till (send him a link to this thread).

 

[Mise]

The greasemonkey script won't be able to rotate your avatar in the way that you want, because it only works on the client that the script is run from.

 

[Till]

Mise is right, greasemonkey can't be used for this.
Writing a script to rotate images at a given interval is a matter of minutes. If you want a web frontend to handle the interval setting and file management (and possibly user accounts), then there's a little more work to do, but all components already exist.

The trickiest part is getting the HTTP headers right, so that browsers update their cache in accordance to the set interval. There is a standard way of doing this (you can read it up in the specifications for the HTTP protocol), but not all browsers might have implemented this accurately. It would most likely be necessary to check for the client's browser type/version, and generate the fitting headers.

 

[Narz]

Ok, well thanks for examining the issue Till!

 

[LucyDuke]

The avatar's URL may be CFC, but that URL might simply be loading the image at the other end of the URL you tap into the user CP when you set your avatar. The real test is to actually try it, but it makes sense to store the image on CFC servers, in case the image gets deleted on the foreign server.

They're kept locally. I've deleted them on the foreign server. Also you can upload your own from your own machine. It ain't calling up your machine every time...

Not to mention that if they weren't stored locally there'd be no need for the file size limit. (Okay, load time I guess, but come on, it's 2009.)

 

[Genocidicbunny]

*Genocidicbunny wonders if that was not what he said several posts above.*

 

[LucyDuke]

You didn't explain to Mise why his theory is incorrect.

 

[dutchfire]

I suppose it might be possible to write a script that'll upload a new image for you every now and then, but that's probably much more of a hassle than just uploading a new image yourself.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

You didn't explain to Mise why his theory is incorrect.

I did, just not in as many words as you.

 

[Mise]

This really isn't worth arguing about, but your "explanation" was irrelevant. The url for the avatar image on this page can look at CFC servers without the actual image being stored on CFC servers.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

If the URL for an avatar image is on the cfc server means the image is being served from cfc. Which means the actual image is being stored on the cfc servers. Unless the forum software uploads every image to a cache when you load a page, but thats just stupid and uses up bandwidth needlessly.

 

[Souron]

It is possible but generally pointless to create a server that will use a local uri as an alias for a non local file. So technically, Mise is right.

There is no reason for CFC to do this, so the fact that the url is local does strongly suggest that the file is stored locally.

 

[Kraznaya]

Why are CFC avatars hosted locally? With free image hosting it seems like a rather pointless exercise to me.

 

[dutchfire]

@Souron: Don't those "don't hotlink this image, go to yaddayadda.com to see the real image" images work on that principle?
@Kraz: Free image hosting services aren't the most stable things on the internet.