unforum

[Nikolai]

pxCard

[BrianEnigma]

I like the idea, but as a signature line in Unfiction, it really doesn't work. There is a policy of no images in your signature. I've seen a few people put their most recent Lietmark image in there and have let that slide. Maybe if your pxCard image was much, much, much more low-profile (i.e. it looks like a simple line of text), it might work--although the ultimate decision as to whether the "no images in your signature" rule can be bent in such a way or rewritten to accommodate goes to SpaceBass.

Otherwise, I would suggest reworking it to a 100x100 image that people could reference as their avatar URL. Already, a few people have used an image of the current 13th Labour statistics as their avatar. Using points, rank, and recent cards might be a good alternative.

Also: are you (re-)generating the image live each time it is requested and/or (re-)requesting the user's profile from the official PXC site each time? If so, you may want to revisit the scalability of such a system and cache some of that data. Otherwise, when it gets popular, either your server will get wedged, PXC's server will get wedged, both, or your IP will end up getting blocked from the PXC servers for too many requests per minute.

[jazzychad]

Darn, Nikolai posted as a guest or else I would PM this question:
How do you create png images on the fly like that.. I've always wanted to learn how.

As for these particular images, they are great... but like BriEnigma said, if you create these on-the-fly each time they are requested using PXC's RSS feeds (which I assume is what you're doing), then it will take a huge amount of time to do it. The RSS feeds aren't the fastest loading things, especially since they are dynamically generated at the time of request (I know this because of my points-graph and another project). Caching would have to be the answer, though not the most desirable one since the data could change at any moment.

My 0.010695 Pounds...

[BrianEnigma]

[Nikolai]

Updated!

[poozle]

I like that avatar, it is very cool, but you might need to sort something about the RSS feeds thing, maybe contact MC and see what they suggest.