7 amazing maps

As you might see on our blog, I’m very passionate about finding great images. So i was surfing the web and i kept seeing this statistics maps that really amazed me. So i decided that you should see them too, that in case you haven’t seen them yet.

This one shows information according to popularity and influenza of every website.

Web trend map 4

This one shows every country in the world and what social network website is the most popular in every one of them. Very interesting.

World map of social networks

The internet has cables under the oceans. That’s nice. There used to be an older map of this kind.

The internet undersea world

This is a chart that shows what people are doing on the internet. It’s analyzed by age and occupation.

What people are doing

A map that shows the most dominant forces on the internet. By forces i mean the most influent country by number of people using internet.

The exploding internet

Where is all the traffic going?

Global Traffic Map

The communities are created according to size. The bigger the better.

Map of online communities

I hope you liked this information and that i was not that boring.

Cache Pic

As I said in my last post, I wanted from the first time to make a cacheing system for my imageroll page. Because i take the images from vi.sualize.us servers and we don’t want to make to much trafic and make stuff worse for them.

So what i did is simple, i made a class that extracts the rss data from theirs servers and get the images to display them. I do this every time someone visits the page. If any image is new for the first time we display the image from vi.sualize.us and run a functions in javascript to check for new images. If any new images exist then we cache them in a folder on our server and the next time a user visits the page that image will be shown from our server. Pretty simple.

For now i’ll just show you the stuff that makes this thing run and if you want i can share the whole script so that you can make one for your blog or website.

I’ll also try to make a WordPress plugin so you can integrate it easily in your blog.

So here we go. We start with the function that checks for new images:

functio checkCache($image_url){
            $path=pathinfo($image_url);
            $img_cached = 'cache/'.$path['filename'].'.'.$path['extension'];
            if(!file_exists($img_cached)) {
                createCacheImg($image_url);
            }
}

This function just checks if the image exists in the “cache” folder. If it’s not there then we run the “createCacheImg” function.

We now need a function to get the image so we check if the image is in the cache folder or not so we know what to display.

    function getImage($or_img) {
        $path=pathinfo($or_img);
        $filename=$path['filename'];
        $img_cached = 'cache/'.$filename.'.'.$path['extension'];
        if(file_exists($img_cached)) {
            $url=$img_cached;
        }else {
            $url=$or_img;
        }

        return $url;
    }

Very simple function that just returns the right url of the image.

Now we cache the image.

function createCacheImg($image){
        $srcsize = getimagesize($image);
        $w = $srcsize[0];
        $h = $srcsize[1];

        $path=pathinfo($image);
        $dest='cache/'.$path['filename'].'.'.$path['extension'];
        if($path['extension']=='jpg' || $path['extension']=='jpeg' || $path['extension']=='JPG') {
            $src_img = imagecreatefromjpeg($image);
        }else if($path['extension']=='gif') {
                $src_img = imagecreatefromgif($image);
            }else if($path['extension']=='png') {
                    $src_img = imagecreatefrompng($image);
                }
        $img_cpy=imagecreatetruecolor($w,$h);
        imagecopy($img_cpy, $src_img, 0, 0, 0, 0, $w, $h);
        if($path['extension']=='jpg' || $path['extension']=='jpeg' || $path['extension']=='JPG') {
            imagejpeg($img_cpy,$dest);
        }else if($path['extension']=='gif') {
                imagegif($img_cpy,$dest);
            }else if($path['extension']=='png') {
                    imagepng($img_cpy,$dest);
                }
        imagedestroy($src_img);
}

This function will save the image into the cache folder. Now we need a new file “checkcache.php” where we put this code:

include('functions.php');
$image=$_GET['image'];
checkCache($image);

Right now we should have this kind of structure in our imageroll folder: A folder “cache” a file “functions.php” where we place all these functions we just did and a file “index.php” where we run the javascript function and display the images.

The “index.php” file requires this code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>

        <title>
            Image ROLL
        </title>

        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript">  google.load("jquery", "1.3.2"); </script>
    </head>
    <body>
<input type="hidden" id="image" value="http://test.com/image.jpg">
<img src="<?=getImage($image)?>" alt="test image"/>
</body>
</html>

We have here a simple index.php file that imports the google api and jquery so we can run a simple ajax function. This is the javascript code that you should insert in this file or a separate one if you want:

            $(document).ready(function() {
                checkCache();
            });

            function checkCache(){
                var page=$('#image');
                var url='checkcache.php';
                var pars='page='+page.val();
                $.get(url,pars);
            }

This will run this function after the page loads and it will check for new images. So this is just a simple script that will make you pages load faster expecialy if you load the images from outside of your server.

If you liked this i’ll go and make a more complex one and even share the imageroll script i did. That until i find the time and make a Wordpress Plugin.

A part of his biography

ERWIN OLAF

BORN IN HILVERSUM IN THE NETHERLANDS IN 1959, ERWIN OLAF LIVES AND WORKES IN AMSTERDAM SINCE THE EARLY 80′S. HIS CURRENT STUDIO IS SITUATED IN A FORMER CHURCH HALL.

MIXING PHOTO-JOURNALISM WITH STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY, OLAF EMERGED IN THE INTERNATIONAL ART SCENE IN 1988 WHEN HIS SERIES ‘CHESSMEN’ WAS AWARDED THE FIRST PRIZE IN THE YOUNG EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHER COMPETITION. THIS AWARD WAS FOLLOWED BY AN EXHIBITION AT THE LUDWIG MUSEUM IN COLOGNE, GERMANY. SINCE THEN OLAF HAS CONTINUED TO EXPLORE ISSUES OF GENDER, SENSUALITY, HUMOR, DESPAIR AND GRACE IN EACH SUCCESSIVE SERIES.

PRINTING HIS EARLY WORK IN DOCUMENTARY-STYLE BLACK-AND-WHITE, HE FIRST GRADUALLY INTRODUCED COLOR AND THEN DIGITAL MANIPULATION. THERE IS GREAT CONTRAST BETWEEN EACH SERIES. MATURE (1999): GOLDEN-HUED PORTRAITS OF ELDERLY WOMEN IN THE POSES OF KITTENISH SUPERMODELS; FASHION VICTIMS (2000): A LEWD COMMENTARY ON THE CONSUMERISM OF SEX AND DESIGNER LABELS; ROYAL BLOOD (2000): MINIMALIST WHITE-ON-WHITE PORTRAITS, DEPICTING THE VENGEFUL NATURE OF MEMBERS OF THE ARISTOCRACY WHO HAVE SUFFERED UNSAVORY DEATHS; PARADISE (2001): PICTURING A DARK AND BAROQUE UNDERWORLD OF GLEEFUL CLOWNING AND LUNACY; SEPARATION (2003) PORTRAYING AN ICE COLD AND INTROVERTED FAMILY IN A STERILE LIVING ROOM. IN HIS FOUR MOST RECENT SERIES RAIN, HOPE, GRIEF AND FALL, ERWIN OLAF RETURNS TO CLASSIC IMAGERY WITH MINIMAL COMPUTER RETOUCHING.

Here are some of his works

Work done for the Dutch National Soccer Team

Dutch Footbal Team

Dutch Football Team

Dutch Football Team

Royal Blood

Princess

Take heart out

Work done for NICORETTE AGENCY

Nicorette Agency 1

Nicorette Agency 2

Nicorette Agency 3

Work done for New York Times

New York Times

New York Times

Now he has more work like this so if you wanna see more go visit his website: www.erwinolaf.com.