Sane

How do you program a targeted picture on your server to be dynamic to some specified data?

I'm thinking I could do it with Python by automatically reuploading a newly saved picture every 10 minutes, and keep it running in the background. But I know there's an easier way.

I'm talking about those pictures that can keep track of your stats on a certain website, or tell the viewer their IP address.

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Waterloo's Canadian Computing Competition (CCC) - Stage 2 Problems, Solutions, and Test Data

coldDeath

That would be PHP.

It can create images, so it uses a function to get an IP and them it turns it into an image.

Cool huh?


You could use Python, but your server would need Python and something liek PyGame or PIL installed.

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Sane

But how does the image target run a php script?

And I could still use Python much more easily the way I mentioned.

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Waterloo's Canadian Computing Competition (CCC) - Stage 2 Problems, Solutions, and Test Data

coldDeath

usually its not a direct link to an image, but a link to a php script. IIRC.

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Sane

Yayzor!

I made a dynamic image in Python for my website. It creates a temporary image with pygame, and that is the return value for the function. If you visit the website with Mozilla you'll see that it's not an actual image, but interpreted as one if you use the img tags.

http://jammersbase.ath.cx/forumimage?userID=1

para

I made one of these in PHP.
http://doommod.sourceforge.net/michael.png

First make the PHP script, start out by explicitly defining the output header:
Then go on to use ImageCreate() and related functions to generate the image data, and write it with ImagePng() [full docs on php.net].

Once your script is complete (ie, you can go to http://www.blah.com/yourscript.php and have it output the image), you can use Apache's modRewrite to modify incoming HTTP requests to reroute yourscript.png to yourscript.php internally. It will appear to others as if it's a valid static image file, but of course it's not

mackenga

PHP's support for dynamically creating images is excellent. If you're working in a CGI script in a language that isn't quite so great at this, see if your host has ImageMagick; you can shell out to it for image operations and it rules.