Maintenance Images
flyingpylon
Registered Users Posts: 260 Major grins
Aaaack! I just noticed that when smugmug is down for maintenance, external requests for images display an ugly (sorry) "maintenance in progress" image.
Is it possible to make this configurable, so that we could display our own image or perhaps no image at all? Also, the size of the image is a problem for me. I'd like it to be much smaller, more like a typical thumbnail size.
I understand that downtime is inevitable despite everyone's efforts to avoid it. I'd just like more control over the results whenever possible. I realize that certain types of problems will preclude any possibility of control at all.
Is it possible to make this configurable, so that we could display our own image or perhaps no image at all? Also, the size of the image is a problem for me. I'd like it to be much smaller, more like a typical thumbnail size.
I understand that downtime is inevitable despite everyone's efforts to avoid it. I'd just like more control over the results whenever possible. I realize that certain types of problems will preclude any possibility of control at all.
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Comments
Hi there,
That's an interesting suggestion. I'll have to think about it a little bit.
As for it being big and ugly, that's probably a result of your HTML, rather than the actual image. It *is* thumbnail sized, exactly, but if you're forcing a web browser to resize the image (using height=768 width=1024 or something in your IMG tag), and it gets a 150x150 image, it does what it thinks you want it to do -resizes it.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing that you really don't want it resized, so it's not like we can just politely create a correct-sized image (wish we could!). Here it is in it's proper size:
I admit, it's not gorgeous, but hopefully you won't see it too often. We're working on that.
We did think it was much better than red Xs like everyone else does.
Thanks,
Don
Thanks for the reply. I realize that the image is a certain size and that whatever height and width I've specified in my HTML will have an influence. I agree that any image is better than the dreaded little red X.
However, consider the case of a smugmug pro user that had a custom host name set up. Someone goes to their site, and because smugmug is down, the maintenance images show up all over the place, and tell people to go to smugmug.com for more information. Oops.
I would suggest doing something like Amazon.com does when an image is not available. They simply return a 1x1 transparent gif. The nice thing about this is that:
- It automatically matches the color scheme of the site
- Can be resized to any dimension without adverse effects
- Can be detected using javascript
On that last point for example, I have a site (more like a live experiment) that uses Amazon Web Services (AWS). When I attempt to display a product image served by Amazon, I have a small script that checks to see if it's their 1x1 gif. If so, I replace it with an image of my choice. Granted, it only works for javascript-enabled browsers, but that's fine with me.
Anyway, just some more things to think about. Thanks.
You know, I think this is a good idea, but I believe we were talking about doing this in the beginning and people were afraid they'd flip out.
If their photos suddenly stop displaying on their forum/blog/webpage/auction/whatever, and there's no visible indicator that something is "wrong" (such as a red X or our current GIF), I'm afraid people may feel like their photos suddenly evaporated.
I'd suggest making it an option that Pros could set, but since the only time you see this message is when our main DB server is down, I wouldn't have access to that data when this is a problem.
Anyone else care to weigh in on whether they like seeing a message (which we could theoretically improve, though HTML would still uglify it) or see red Xs or see nothing?
Thanks,
Don