Web-space lacking who want custom avatars...

[Captain Southbird (EHOL Creator)]

Okay, so I hacked an old upload script I had laying around to be designed for the sole purpose of giving everyone up to three avatar images they can store on-site for their personal usage.

It's not extensively tested, but it seemed to work well enough for the few trials I gave it.

Obviously you require an account here at EHOL and you must be logged in.  So the world of "guests" doesn't plague my little offering.  

Access it here!


Here's the ugly little throw-together.  



Ugly!  But all it does is upload files, right?  I don't think we care how it looks.  

It will return the exact URL you input as use for your avatar, but just for the sake of explaining it, it'll always be in the format of:

http://www.el-hazardonline.net/El-Hazard/temp/forum_users/[raw username][slot #].ext

... no matter what the original name was when you uploaded.  [raw username] is the name the system recognizes you by, not your "Display Name".  For example, my raw name is "rob_jinnai".  [slot #] is the selected slot number (1 - 3).  ".ext" is .GIF/.JPG/.PNG, whatever format was uploaded.


Give it a shot, if you need this.

[executor82]

Jepp! It seems to work!  

Thanx Rob!!!

[Saucer]

Hey, great service Rob! One question though, is there a way to delete an old avatar from a slot you don't want anymore?

[Captain Southbird (EHOL Creator)]

No need.  It just overwrites.  And I'll bear holding on to an unused <75KB image file.  

[larewen_evenstar]

And you can afford to let them do this?

[Captain Southbird (EHOL Creator)]

The system I'm currently using has 6.8GB of disk space available, and 75KB is nothing relatively in the world of modern bandwidth.  But I've seen a lot of 400KB GIFs springing up on other forums, and THAT is quite a bit of bandwidth to spit out.  So, yes, by the way I've set things up, it's easily supportable.

[MrWhat]

Very nice.  And very thoughtful of you, for your users.

This is probably a profoundly stupid question, but would there be any reason for a user like me to use a service like this?  Is there any advantage to a server hosting its images locally, for example, if Internet traffic is heavy or a user has a slow connection, and there's one less server to contact to render a page?  Just curious.  I'm a database programmer, but I don't know as much about the Internet as I should.

[Captain Southbird (EHOL Creator)]

I like your current avatar.

This is probably a profoundly stupid question, but would there be any reason for a user like me to use a service like this?  

Well, while there is time spent negotiating your DNS->IP, and that can vary depending on the name servers attached to it and how quickly they can respond, I suspect whatever's powering your end is actually better than mine, and bandwidth from multiple directions rather than all from me is better off for us as a whole.  So I'd stick with the way you are, this service is only really needed by those of us with no other option.

[MrWhat]

Well, while there is time spent negotiating your DNS->IP [...]

Good.  That's what I thought  

[Saucer]

No need.  It just overwrites.  And I'll bear holding on to an unused <75KB image file.  

That's really a great service to offer. Thanks again Rob!

[dooky]

Ah! Very nice! Cheers, Rob...