My name is Jeff Gordon and I build websites. When I'm not working, you can probably find me daydreaming about things like space ships or dinosaurs. Maybe a dinosaur flying a space ship. That's awesome.
What started out as an experiment turned into a pretty cool way to find some totally sweet banners for my site. I came up with the idea after thinking It would be cool to have some pictures of dinosaurs and robots and space ships to use as a banner background. Having absolutely zero photos of any of those things, I turned to the next best source: Flickr. I started out doing random searches for single tags, but I wasn't finding anything worthy at all. It was mostly just portraits of people in front of dinosaur statues or people's home-made robotic experiments. Boring.
Having no way filter out tags from a search, my next thought was to search for pairs of tags. One tag would be the primary subject of my search (like a dinosaur), and the second tag would be something like a verb or photographic technique that might filter out portraits and other boring photos (like macro). The results were immediately improved. I set about creating two lists of words that when randomly paired up might produce interesting photos. The banner up above was the end product. So far I'm incredibly pleased with some of the results:
I'll admit that a lot of the photos which look good as a banner wouldn't even be considered great photography as photos on their own, but that doesn't even matter. The secret to transforming them into a great banner is simple: Offset by -50 pixels on both the X and Y axis and crop to 650 by 300 pixels. Instant background art.
It's not always this awesome, though. Even with this great formula for success at your fingertips, you'll still encounter some duds. To help remove terrible and/or inappropriate photos, I've implemented a system that will check to see if a photo has been viewed in the past, and if so, check it's voting score. Once a photo has reached a score of -3 (it has been given a thumbs-down three times), it will no longer appear on the site. Here's a few duds I'll be glad to never see again:
And finally...
So there you have it. That's all I have to say about that.
First thing: I decided to play with HTML 5 because it's the new hip thing to do. I later found out that there's no real benefit for me to use HTML 5 tags over regular ones right now. As a result, my website is severely crippled in Internet Explorer. I'll fix that in the next day or two.
Update: I somewhat fixed things for ol' IE. The random photo banner doesn't really work past the first page-load, and there are no fancy CSS 3 rounded corners.
Second thing: The banner at the top uses photos sourced from Flickr searches using a combination of two words that are chosen at random from a pool of about two dozen. I tried to use more abstract words that might filter out photos of people. At the bottom of the page, you can see what words were chosen for the currently displayed banner photo. I spent hours on Saturday and Sunday (about 7,500 Flickr API requests in 24 hours) tweaking the list of words so that I get more interesting results. It's not perfect; I still get a lot of really bad photos. Some really good ones, but some really awful. So right now I am risking you coming to my site and seeing a completely inappropriate or confusing photo in my banner! To deal with this in the future, I've set up a little voting system where anyone can "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" a banner photo if it's particularly good or particularly bad. I'll also take suggestions for new words to add to the pool if you've got a good one!
Update: There's now a handy tooltip at the top that links directly to the Flickr photo used in the banner. Hovering over it will tell you what tags were used. I also added the words "bokeh", "catadioptric", "vignette", and "lomography". Thanks Keith and Brent!
Other things: Everything is way more simple. I completely got rid of comments! I may bring them back, but I don't really see a purpose for my site. If somebody really has something to tell me, they can send me an email. There's no search right now, mostly because I was really excited to get my new design up and running and some features didn't make make it in yet. There are some other minor CSS things that I need to fix too.
If you found this via Twitter or Facebook, it's because I've got my blog automatically publishing new articles on Twitter now. The Twitter application on Facebook also automatically sets my Facebook status to whatever I "tweet". Amazing. Now I can shamelessly plug my own website in a much more trendy fashion.
So if you've subscribed to my website's news feed RSS (different than the regular blog RSS), then be ready for some insane redundancy.
Jan 17, 2010 Update: I've changed my blog around and this link no longer works.
Last.fm just released an experimental little application called Boffin, which scans your entire music library and creates a tag cloud based on all of the genres in your collection. It doesn't just read the genre tags for every song, though, it instead looks up every song of yours in the Last.fm database and creates a tag cloud using their own tags. So you don't have to worry about retagging all your stuff! The result is something very similar to the regular Last.fm radio, except it plays from your own collection rather than theirs.
