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Blogs » Archive for August 28th, 2007
The Future of Imagery? Content Aware Image Resizing
Every now and again something comes along that just makes you go ‘wow’. I think this is one of those moments.
Last week Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir demonstrated their new ‘Content Aware Image Resizing‘ research for the first time, as seen in this YouTube clip. The demonstration does a far better job at explaining it than I can, but the executive summary goes something like this:
Currently we have two methods of presenting photographic imagery within a liquid (resizable) layout. Most of the time we crop our image to a size that we like and then lock it to display at those exact dimensions, allowing the text to flow and wrap around it when resizing occurs.
It’s also possible (though not common) to set the image size as a percentage of the page width, allowing it to scale with the page. Of course, this inevitably results in generated artifacts, distortions and noise at all non-standard dimensions.
‘Content Aware Image Resizing’ (CAIR) takes a completely different tack. If we scale our image width down by 1 pixel, rather than removing a random vertical column of pixels, the CAIR process …
sitepoint.com ranked 3rd most popular eBusiness site in the world!
sitepoint.com was today recognized as the 3rd most popular eBusiness web site in the world by ebizMBA.com, just behind news.com and ZD-Net.com.
The article used a number of metrics to list 25 must-have bookmarks for anyone serious about succeeding in online business. Web sites were ranked by a combination of inbound links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.
Here are some reasons why I think we made the list:
- Our online marketplace continues to grow at warp speed. I’ve posted before on why I believe that if you haven’t taken the plunge to get involved, you should do so now.
- We produce some pretty awesome kits, books, articles, and newsletters sharing the secrets of doing business on the Web to entrepreneurs all around the world.
- To top it off, we’ve got a massive online community of entrepreneurs sharing their online success stories every day in the SitePoint Forums.
So if you’re looking to make money from the Web, be sure to put sitepoint.com on the top of your shopping cart.
Which reference sites do you trust?
While completing the tech edit on the 2nd edition of the PHP Anthology the issue of linking came up; specifically, linking to authoritative reference material on the web. It came up because I would often link to a Wikipedia page and half of the editing team were opposed to such preferential treatment of one web site.
The issue isn’t simple one. Regarding PHP, the php.net manual is the authoritative reference site. The various web technology standards are also represented by authority web sites. For example XML-RPC has xmlrpc.com and CSS and XHTML have the W3C. But what about general topics like REST, design patterns or role-based access control? If you need reference material on such topics who can you trust?
I like Wikipedia because their pages are often an excellent focal point for a topic, are readable, contain links to other references and nerdy topics are always well represented and maintained. And of course, when using Google to search for general …
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