perlmonksflair.com : get your perlmonks flair!

[gideondsouza]

perlmonksflair.com has been hijacked and now points to a porn site: see kcott's node Warning: PerlMonksFlair now links to a porn site

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

In my endeavour to learn perl I built a little project for the folks at perlmonks. A flair generator :)

It's called http://www.perlmonksflair.com.

It was made with perl, varnish, dancer, starman and lots of love!

Just stick your username into the end of the url with a "jpg" and voila! You have a cool looking badge with neat graphics based on your level, all designed by my dear friend Jennifer Holt.

Enjoy! Please tell me what you think? Suggestions, feedback and insults all welcome. (There were talks with my designer about different themes and possibly an LOTR theme in tengwar?)

Feel free to post issues here : https://github.com/gideondsouza/perlmonksflair

Updates 12-Dec-13 :

1. Site was down for some odd reason. Brought it back up.

Updates 29-Sept-13 :

1. Cleanups and some refactoring
2. The project is now a cpan module : PerlMonksFlairApp

Updates 10-Sept-13 :

1. Changed the sizes for levels, making them smaller and also fit on the badge in all cases.
2. Fixed crashes when user is initiate. (Really sorry about this one!)

Updates 21-Aug-13 :

1. Flair badge will now show the actual level "Priest", "Monk" instead of a level.
2. Fixed crash for usernames with spaces, dots and hyphens
3. App ensures it gets a user (?type=user) so it works for a user like "japh"
4. Experience shows up in black text for Scribe. (This is a wee bit of a hack) I shall talk to my designer.
5. Images are now cached for 5 days. There is some additional browser caching added.

Updates 3-May-15 :

1. www.perlmonksflair.com was down for several months... I had some serious health issues..
2. The site is now up.. but will be slow because I haven't been able to get varnish 4.0 running.
3. (See if you could help me with the varnish problem : http://serverfault.com/questions/688225/basic-varnish-4-0-setup-doesnt-seem-to-work

Updates 1-Feb-17 :

1. So the site was down... with me in some dark health conditions...
2. The site is now up again...

Updates 31-Jul-17

1. ...and we're back up again... so sorry folks. I promise I'll ensure this site stays alive permanently. I had some kind problem on the server. Anyway. It's hosted on a new Ubuntu droplet now.

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Thanks for reporting all those issues :)

[tobyink]

It would be nice if the badges included the monk's level as a name (e.g. "Priest") instead of numerically.

[gideondsouza]

Yep. I was thinking about this but wasn't too sure. If more people want it this way I shall get it done :)

[jdporter]

I concur with tobyink.

Also, please read What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?. :-)

[jakeease]

Very nice badge! I'll join the chorus for level name

[gideondsouza]

This is now done!

[tobyink]

Maybe smaller font?

Oh; and the moon; on a stick.

[syphilis]

Neat idea - and nicely implemented, too !!.
I'm another of those that would prefer the "Level" to be replaced with the actual title ... and, depending upon what others think, I'd perhaps do away with the "Experience" entry altogether.

Cheers,
Rob

[hossman]

FWIW: You can get someones eperience really easily w/o needing to parse HTML using the xml display type, ie: http://perlmonks.org/?node=gideondsouza;displaytype=xml

But for reasons i'm not clear on, the XML displyatype doesn't include the level, so you'd have to compute that from the experience.

[gideondsouza]

Hey! That's really cool. It's weird why it doesn't include levels. I'll try and make this and all updates together.

I'm not entirely certain how much faster it will turn out if I parse xml instead of html. I am searching for all td tags though and there are a lot of them

[Loops]

Nice job. Now if only we could set a URL for profile image instead of having to upload a fixed image...

[gideondsouza]

Ah! thanks. For a second there I thought you were suggesting putting the profile image in the badge, like most people do. But this really spoils the badge.

Yea that's true, I tried to add the badge to my profile description but the image doesn't render! :'(

[Happy-the-monk]

I like it, but it goes on strike (404) when used with my name.

Cheers, Sören

[gideondsouza]

Hey!! I'm really sorry, I feel ashamed. I will try and see why this is happening!

I think I know why and it might be simple.

[Your Mother]

Spaces in usernames, like Your Mother, also don't work: 404. :P And 500s are pretty easy to generate. Fun though. So, nice going. If you had it on github, you'd probably already have the patches you need in pending pull requests.

[gideondsouza]

This has been fixed.

[pokki]

Neat, but the Scribe picture makes "Experience" hard to read, white on white: here

[kcott]

Please see "Warning: PerlMonksFlair now links to a porn site".

[Anonymous Monk]

http://www.perlmonksflair.com/961.jpg cause 961 is Anonymous Monk but using 1049026, not a nodetype=user, gives err 500, you might consider redirecting on those

[Grimy]

and viola!

Err… “viola” is the French word for “raped”. You probably meant “voilà”. Just sayin’.

[Happy-the-monk]

“viola” is the French word for “raped”

really? But most of the time, viola is just a violet.

Cheers, Sören

[tobyink]

It's perfectly correct. Violer is the verb "to rape"; conjugated into the 3rd person, singular past tense, it's viola.

But also it's a violet, and a musical instrument.

I can't imagine many contexts where the three usages would be likely to be confused.

[Anonymous Monk]

Maybe he meant viola or Viola caipira?

[gideondsouza]

Yes yes! I mean't voila!

[QM]

Blocked by WebSense at my $work.

[gideondsouza]

Ah That's too bad!

[Anonymous Monk]

Do you know why WebSense does the blocking?

[Boldra]

Very nice, thankyou! The link to http://www.jenniferleigh.ca/ seems to be broken.

[gideondsouza]

You're very welcome. I Fixed the link!

[sotona]

Since the flair is cached for 5 days, it doesn't reflect the real experience points. Is there any possibility to check an actual exp level and generate the new flair if smth changed?

[gideondsouza]

I'm not entirely sure if I get you. Are you saying I should fetch the XP and check if it has changed? It would defeat the purpose of caching a bit. I have an extremely light server running this app and wanted to avoid the call to the site itself. Perlmonks.org is very slow, and making calls to check it everytime would be expensive.

As alternatives I was thinking of (1) A sliding cache window, if your XP updates frequently then I will cache less frequently. But this is hard because it means I have to write a varnish plugin. (2) A feature to allow users to refresh the cache for just their flair. This is slightly more do-able

If you submit it as an issue I will take this up when I can: https://github.com/gideondsouza/perlmonksflair/issues/new

[AppleFritter]

A feature to allow users to refresh the cache for just their flair. This is slightly more do-able

That would be quite useful, especially for the newly-initiated who move through the levels faster than established monks. Something like http://www.perlmonksflair.com/<username>.jpg?purge to force an update, perhaps?

You may want to keep an eye on how much that's used so that people don't put too much load on the server by constantly purging their badge, of course. Alternatively, you could do some sort of rate limiting for purging as well -- say, once per day, or (if you want to allow a little more flexibility) three times per day and seven times per week.

Thanks to both you and your friend for creating this, BTW!

[Anonymous Monk]

Are all the pictures male?

[gideondsouza]

Um. I think Beadle is female. Didn't mean to be gender bias. The artwork was designed by a female.