Are they still running your code? I'd curious to know more of the history of Viaweb between 1999 and now. Is the architecture still the same (CLisp backed by files)?
I'm curious from a "how good is Lisp long term" angle.
The code later got translated into C++. However, we had a template language for describing pages that was basically Common Lisp with a few macros. These templates are stored on disk as s-expressions. They couldn't change the template language because some users had created their own. So the C++ version literally had to read Lisp programs off disk and execute them. I.e. it was a Lisp interpreter.
That's what I was talking about at the time when I described it somewhere as a new world record for Greenspun's tenth rule.
(It's called default because it used to be the placeholder photo on my website for people who hadn't uploaded a profile pic. I don't know who originally took it, or how to ask them for permission to use it, so I replaced it with something else. I keep it around because it's really funny though)
I think both don't work. The point of a placeholder pic is to have something tangible there while looking at a layout. If the picture is more interesting than the layout, then people will focus on the picture. That's the motivation behind "lorem ipsum": it superficially looks like English, but it's gibberish and people won't focus on it instead of the layout.
That wasn't really my intention, (why the oops). I was trying to see how massive a a scroll bar I could make (sadly firefox does not scroll images (hmmmm, or maybe it was autoresizing it to fit on available screen). Also, being a programmer and very much into testing I naturally think of pushing bounds.
Oh yea I'm working on an option to change the background color. I was hoping to use an elegant syntax like http://dummyimage.com/300x250#ccc for a gray background. Too bad you can't capture anything after the hash tag on the server side. Any feedback on a better syntax?
He isn't distributing the font, is he? Rendered representations of fonts are explicitly permitted by US copyright law under all circumstances as far as I'm aware.
Very cool. Suggestion: If you make the background pattern of the image a 1px checkerboard (light gray on dark gray or something else not too obnoxious) then that will make it easier to spot places where an image is being rescaled in-browser. A 1px border might be useful too...
Good idea! I'm working on making an option to change the background color. Ideal syntax would be http://dummyimage.com/300x200#ccc for a gray background. Too bad the server is never sent anchor information so I've got to find a better way.
I'm a bit confused. It doesn't seem like this is very "lorem ipsum". Lorem ipsum looks like actual text, whereas, this does not look like actual image content (due to most images not being solid gray). To my mind, a better lorem ipsum image would have a variety of colors, shading, textures (which is probably why Lenna is a popular choice). This way you could see how a variety of image colors work with your design, color scheme, etc.
If this is simply for formatting placeholders while designing web pages, wouldn't <span style="width: xxx; height: yyy; background-color: grey; border: 1px solid black;"></span> be a pretty easy workaround, and a lot easier on the network bandwidth?
I'm not sure I follow your response correctly, but it seems like your response is: it's easy to switch image sizes this way. But you still have to edit the HTML, and it's not that hard to edit the width/height. Maybe I don't understand?
The more important point to my mind is that grey is definitely not lorem-ipsum. It doesn't help me evaluate anything except image size. And since it's easy to get a sized placeholder, a server to generate a URL seems not that helpful.
My normal advice to you nifty niche App'ers is to look at long standing apps to see what they did right for revenue. Namely http://www.network-science.de/ascii/
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[1] GD still has its own problems, but it seems like subscribing to secunia for GD would catch most, like this recent one :: http://secunia.com/advisories/38055/
I've now gemified it for use in Rails apps without having to hit a separate site. It emits data URIs at the moment only, so no IE love yet. I had immediate need for it.
That's an interesting solution but couldn't you just resize a 1px grey GIF with the width and height attributes to act as a placeholder? You could also add the dimensions to an ALT and TITLE attributes so they are displayed when you mouse over it.
And you can always include jQuery with the overlay plugin to enhance the mouse over experience. Meanwhile, you can try to render 640x480 text in custom fonts via canvas... etc.
While an interesting idea I know I wouldn't use it if it was an ad. Despite the problem of my sample images trying to sell to me it would be annoying when trying to mockup a design (with images that randomly have undesired colors, patterns, etc.)
It's a solvable problem, and with the right targeting could actually be useful. How many people would discover Basalmiq for the first time via the placeholder image on their WIP site?
I think giving a brief explanation is useful. Maybe "Sorry! We can't generate images that large!" or something. That explains what's going on without going too deep on the max dimensions and whatnot.
I just implemented a 3-layered payment processing system with infinite logging, and a double-ledger accounting system. Perfect. However, during testing, my colleague found that typing a negative number and clicking "Add Funds" deducted money from the user's balance and put a fund-transfer ticket out (unauthorized withdrawal!) And when the balance reached zero, no visible feedback or error was giving, but still the electronic fund transfer was initiated (free money!!)
That taught me to process my financial side-effects with explicit, visible, calls; the generic dispatch, and abusing behind the scene meta-object features will make you broke.
