Passed 100.000 views on flickr!

— Generative art, Other

Since I have a PRO account at flickr.com, I have nice stats.
Today I’ve reached 100.000 hits!!

Some history
This was my first image on flickr, still a little bit proud of it.
And.. this image provides the most hits:

Google logo render - Mark Knol

The first image was uploaded on March 26, 2008. Today it is May 16, 2009, Lets say one year later. I never imagined I would have that many hits, just with images..? 😮 I mean, this website+blog doesn’t reach that amount. I know some factors that could help reach a lot of hits and/or people. I love to share that with you, because it has some interesting facts.

1. Use groups
Groups help you to spread your images. It’s not only useful to submit your images to the groups, but it is also a great place to find cool/related images that you like too. I joint a lot of groups, mostly to explore and find generative arts, fractal images and new digital artworks. Some groups put the images from the group upon their or different websites. Every body can put images from a group or from yourself or from another person on his website (it could depends on the image-rights and it should link back). I found some groups which have successful websites, so I guess that would help too. Imagine when I post an image to a group it appears on multiple websites 😛 O, how I love social networks.

2. Love your contacts
I have found a lot of people who liked my art. They hitted the favorite button or they post comments. I really like that, I read them all 😀 Sometimes people even ask some questions about the art with a PM. I add all those people to my contact list, just because I love them and I can follow their works too. There are a lot of talented people on flickr and I like to be connected with people who like flash and create generative arts too. I like to comment and explore new works from others too, it is mostly very inspiring. It is handy to have a netwerk in your social netwerk, right?

3. Enjoy being linked
The internet is full of images that are copy/pasted from other sites. Flickr is a great place to find images and put it on your site/webblog. Well, people do this with your images too. Just be proud, and enjoy seeing your images on different websites. In your stats you can see which sites have linked your works. Especially the Google logo render is a big hit on blogs with posts about our big friend.

Funny sidestory;  As you already know; my name is mark knol. There are a lot of posts about Google Knol on the internet (the Google wikipedia thing). Some who use the Google logo render thinks it is funny my name is the same as the Google service and the image is the Google logo 🙂 LOL

4. Keep making images
I guess it is also important to create a lot of great images and become better. You can drop experiments in your account too and ask other members for their opinion. A social netwerk should be social, right? So let us keep posting and creating new creative things too.

Well, that’s it. Keep on rocking. Thanks guys.

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Update: Messed comments fixed

— Other

Good news, the comments are fixed now. Some comments I had to fix manualy, they are reposted again to the right post. I guess the problem appeared when I used the ‘related post’ script in my single post page. Luckily 3mind.at has already created a nice solution (found it via Google), so thanks guys.

Commenting should be working properly, so keep posting 😉

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How to crop with AS3

— ActionScript, Code snippets

Quick post; How to crop a bitmap / displayobject / Movieclip / Sprite or just the stage with Flash/AIR/AS3.

function crop( _x:Number, _y:Number, _width:Number, _height:Number, displayObject:DisplayObject = null):Bitmap
{
var cropArea:Rectangle = new Rectangle( 0, 0, _width, _height );
var croppedBitmap:Bitmap = new Bitmap( new BitmapData( _width, _height ), PixelSnapping.ALWAYS, true );
croppedBitmap.bitmapData.draw( (displayObject!=null) ? displayObject : stage, new Matrix(1, 0, 0, 1, -_x, -_y) , null, null, cropArea, true );
return croppedBitmap;
}

Usage:

var myCroppedImage:Bitmap = crop( 100, 100, 200, 200 );
this.addChild ( myCroppedImage );

Download
» Download CropUtil class on googlecode.

Custom shapes

If you need to crop a Sprite with a irregular shape, you should use a mask. When you have used a mask and also want to crop it, put the MovieClip and the shape in a container, and use the container as argument in the crop function.

Save the cropped image

To save the capture, consider using my ImageSaver class

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