Dalegroup.net random images
28 Oct 2004I just noticed what is (to me) a new feature over at the Dalegroup.net root website, which loads a random image for each request. It’s quite stylish; my personal favorite image is number 6, because dead trees are cool! Erm… yes.
What, you want details? The contrast between the tree and the sky is great, as is the degree of change in lighting (specifically shadow) evident on the tree itself. Perspective is a bit wonky, but as always, it’s a subjective thing! That, and the crop probably enhances any perspective evident in the original (which I have seen, but don’t recall all that well).
I’m tempted to steal this idea, although I have no idea how best to apply it here. Whenever I get around to working up a new style for this website (I’ve got a sketch, but no time to implement), we’ll see how best to plagiarise that concept — which is of course featured on other websites in turn, perhaps most notably Photo Matt.
One thing I’ll bear in mind, and would perhaps recommend Michael looks at, is keeping the filesize of the images right down, to the extent that load times aren’t consequential to any users — this is far more important when displaying images as CSS backgrounds, because there aren’t any placeholder graphics displayed in user agents by default, so users won’t wait for them to load! Another suggestion more immediately applicable and concrete is that instead of generating a new stylesheet from PHP, thus completely killing browser caching (half of the advantage of CSS), you have a single CSS file and use inline styles, or the style attribute with a specific tag, to specify your custom backgrounds.
Aside from that, it’s snazzy!