colortoy one

My recent idea for a global webcam weather network got me coding. Introducing color toy 1. A very simple tool to let you see the average color of an image. I’m playing with grabbing the average color of a few outdoor webcams over time to plot color etc.. against time. I thought some of you might enjoy playing with it too.

For example to see the current ‘color of Aberdeen’ click here. It’s grabbing the City Council webcam view of the harbour. Glamorous.

To see your own average color just drop the URL of a JPEG into the form above. Something like “http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/home_photo_codepoet.jpg” (see it here). It has to be a jpeg, anything else will likely break the tool and give worrying DB errors etc… Actually some JPEGs seem to do that too, PHP seems to hate the encoding or something. Just make sure you play nice, and make any images reasonably sized, legal, and colorful!

If you know of any good outdoor webcams publishing a jpeg, rather than a flash stream or other less accessible format, do email me the URL > steve@inventoids.com. Collecting data from them will help with Color toy 2 which will be a step closer to the global webcam weather thing. I’ll post the source once I’ve cleaned it up a bit, PHP isn’t my strongest.

Some interesting / useful bits and pieces on the bookmarks as part of this. Mainly related tools, techniques and posts:

September 7, 2007 | Filed Under , ,

 

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One Response to “colortoy one”

  1. what color is my website - colortoy 2 : Inventoids on September 11th, 2007 11:37 am

    [...] made a modest extension to colortoy 1, and quite grandly titled it colortoy 2. Where colortoy 1 told you the average color of a single [...]

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