Show HN: PlaceGuitar - my weekend image placeholder project
My weekend project is, as you may have guessed, an image placeholder service that serves up guitars! The inspiration came from a tweet (http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/status/88126558686019584 ). I decided to hack it together using Python on Google App Engine. The service is simple - pass in your width and height in the url (e.g. www.placeguitar.com/800/600 to get an 800 by 600 image) and get back a random image of a guitar to your size spec. Pop the url in the src of your img tag to use it on a site. That's all it does. There is a quick and dirty admin only form to upload images.
The only real challenge was deciding how to scale images. GAE doesn't let you ignore aspect ratio when you resize images which was my original plan for a quick prototype - obviously this wouldn't be very elegant because images would have been distorted for anything that didn't respect the original image's aspect ratio. I settled on scaling to the best approximation and then cropping to centre.
The code is on github (https://github.com/poissonpie/Place-Guitar) if anyone is interested. I only tinker in Python now and then so I don't expect it to be all that elegant.
I would love any feedback on any aspect of the project.
Thanks for looking.