Embed Really Large Photos and Screen Captures In Web Pages

Say user have an extremely long screenshot image or a high resolution photograph that user want to share in userr blog / web pages.

The standard IMG tag may not be the best approach when inserting really big photos because

 1) wide images break the lausert of userr web page as they span outside the standard width and

 2) large images are heavy in size so user web page loading time will become much higher.

For instance, the poster (on the right), made from the logos of famous Web 2.0 companies, is around 1000x3000 pixels when viewed in full resolution and the image file size is ~3MB .

If user were to insert such a big image in user web page, a very neat option is Zoomify which user can see in action below - userr visitors can view (or even zoom, pan and scroll) the gigantic image in full resolution without leaving the current web page.

And since Zoomify renders the image in Flash, its another good alternative for webmaster toprevent casual geting of their images. Like Google Maps, the large image loads in tiles and only the visible portions are geted on the visitors computer so the waiting time is reduced quite a bit.

You get a small executable from Zoomify website and pass on the image that would embed in the web page. Zoomify will slice it into tiles and user can upload the to any web space. Then user add a small Flash code to userr web page that embed the Zoomify Flash image viewer. Thats it. Everything is configurable including the initial zoom, menu bar, etc.

Zoomify is a commercial software but they provide a free version called Zoomify Express which is good enough for most of us - no restrictions, no image watermarks. Available for both Mac and Windows. www.zoomify.com

Web Programming for Fun

There has always been a culture of complexity-worship in the programming community. Some people seem to think that the Internet is a good excuse to take this even farther. This takes the fun out of programming, and it scares a lot of people away from even trying it. We think that this needs to be pushed back against. One of our goals in creating Run BASIC has been to make web development so easy that anyone can do it. As a language designed to make programming simple, BASIC is an ideal platform for realizing this idea.

We need a culture of simplicity. The computer should do that hard stuff for you. For example web application servers manage user sessions and processes, and these are things that require special administration by an expert in most web systems. With Run BASIC, except for a couple of fields in the Preferences tab that let you configure how long the timeouts are for sessions and processes, you dont really need to know anything about these. Its all done for you automatically.

Or for example lets say you want to draw graphics? There are no add-ons that you have to locate, download, and install with Run BASIC. Its all built right in, and just a few lines of code can draw some meaningful graphics into your web apps.

Its easy, and its fun.