I finally got off my butt tonight and updated the top rotation. Here's the stats:

So the cycle time is 30 days, 15 hours. And I hope you don't get tired of Nanoha, Negima!?, and Ai Yori Aoshi, because between them they're about half of it.

UPDATE: About two months ago, when I embarked on this effort, I got the following email:

Just read you're updating the rotation and wanted to ask as a regular reader if you'd post the titles in a bit higher contrast color to the backgrounds of the pics.  My eyes aren't as good now as in the past and sometimes the titles of the source videos are very difficult to make out.  Thanks and keep up the great writing.

I know that sometimes the show names are very hard to make out, but it isn't really something I want to fix.

I add those captions using Paint Shop Pro 8.1, with a script. The script is all set up to place the caption in the right location, so I edit it (they're stored in text) to change the caption text, and then run it as a batch job to label all the images for a particular show (e.g. all 120 for Ai Yori Aoshi this time). When I came up with this, I did some experimenting with the choices available, and finally decided that my best choice was one which causes each pixel of the text to be set to the inverse of the background:

It worked better than, for instance, a single solid color but it still has the problem of being hard to see if the background is neutral gray or close to it. But it has the great virtue of not requiring me to manually label each image.

Using this approach, plus other automated processing methods I've worked out, I was able to scale and label the entire update this evening in about 3 hours. But if I had to manually label over 600 images, it would have taken forever.

(Um, and don't even think about suggesting other ways of doing it, OK?)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:14 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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