Friday, March 15, 2019

Also too clever

The name of this blog is a nod to a project that, for a few months in 2010, was arguably the state of the art method for showing your blog in chronological order, oldest first.

The Rube Goldberg cartoon, "Self-Operating Napkin," illustrating an absurd contraption.

It was a glorious hack involving several third party web services, javascript, 7 roles of duct tape, a pentagram drawn in salt, and the use of cascading style sheets.

The project was in short deranged, but oddly satisfying to figure out and document. It no longer works, but was fun while it lasted.

In that spirit are some tricks and refinements for images that are techy and fussy and, who knows, maybe useful to someone.

Who's going to tell you about these if not me?

Special effects from your image urls 

Maybe you have noticed that photos hosted on Google's servers have long and incomprehensible web addresses. For instance:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6OxHpGsIpsE/XIP1-X-bAMI/AAAAAAAAD64
/0IGdyXUaSCIZ3DAqyykIHvG3PU2DQ2dewCLcBGAs/s320/rgoldburg.gif


It turns out you can affect the size, picture quality, orientation, and even cropping of the image by hacking the part in boldfaced type.

For instance, using the character string h220-w160-cc creates a circular crop:
The Rube Goldberg cartoon, "Self-Operating Napkin," cropped in a circle.
Whether you ever want to do anything like that is another question, but to know more I recommend


    There are still a few functioning reverse-order hacks, by the way.

    4 comments:

    1. @Adam
      Oh! Beautiful & Innovative
      Saving to study further & to try use in future
      Learning new is always funny & Worthy
      Thanks a lot

      ReplyDelete
    2. @Adam
      by the way, please, any way to get the image/picture in left-right reverse order? (ie., left as right & right as left)
      any link to that post, suffice
      Thanks again

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. @Ifinder: I think you are describing what photographers call a "flop."

        There is no truly comprehensive guide to this, so maybe, but I have not found a parameter that will do that. (It isn't "-f," though.)

        If you learn of one, will you post it here?

        Delete
      2. @Adam
        Oh! Sure
        Thank You, again, very much

        Delete