Cristiano on Tech/Life

I got quite some response from people about my Histogram webservice and bookmarklet last week. Thank you all for that. Since then I have decided to try and kill some bugs and implement some of the improvements. So here is a quick recap.

Bookmarklet

Here is the new Histogram bookmarklet. It is 99% the same but next to some bug fixes the only new feature is that it now has a workaround to allow you to get a Histogram on photos from people on Flickr who have licensed their photos as “All Rights Reserved”.

Webservice

One of the first things I heard from someone is to make this into a Ubiquity plugin. It made me realize that I really have 2 products here: a webservice and a bookmarklet that calls the webservice. So in contrary to my last post I decided it would be cool to see what other services we could build on this webservice.

To make this work I added some important changes to the webservice. Most importantly it now caches the output for 24 hours! This makes stuff way faster if you include a histogram in a blog post that gets a few hits a day.

Secondly I added a height parameter. There is no height parameter as images are always 2:1. Main reasons for this being that it just looks better, and Google Chart API apparently has a limit of maximum 300.000 pixels per chart. Setting a fixed ratio therefore makes stuff easier. The max width allowed is 385 (making the largest image 385×770 = 296.450 pixels).

Improvements

According to a few people, the histograms don’t always look like they are supposed to. I find this interesting as I don’t really see why that would be. I still invite people to look at the code and tell me.

Secondly I have heard about some people having problems in IE6 or 7. I tried IE7 this afternoon but couldn’t figure out how to bookmark a bookmarklet. If someone know, please tell me. I will look at IE6 tomorrow.