In case you haven't noticed it yet, I have added yet another new and exciting feature to my weblog. You see, along with the hundreds of other things I am trying to learn these days, Perl is one of the more difficult. Wouldn't it be nice if I could generate a random image? I am certain that everyone reading this entry would certainly agree that such added functionality would improve the quality of this site immensely. Perhaps attracting even more droves of visitors. So that is what I did. In order to see it, just look up at the upper left hand corner of this page and you should see it. Each time you visit or hit the refresh button, the image of the future famous blogger will change.

Here is the script for all you fine folks out there who know a little bit about the wonderful world of Perl programming:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT use Image::Info qw(image_info dim); use CGI; my $pathroot = "/home/users/yourdomain.com/public_html"; my $htmlroot = "http://www.yourdomain.com"; # get the parameters, if possible. my $q = new CGI; my $subdir = $q->param("subdir"); my $prefix = $q->param("prefix"); my $ext = $q->param("ext"); my $maxn = $q->param("maxn"); my $border = $q->param("border"); # defaults of given parameter not passed. if (!$subdir) { $subdir = "blog_images"; } if (!$prefix) { $prefix = "my_image_"; } if (!$ext) { $ext = "jpg";} if (!$maxn) { $maxn = 9; } if (!$border) { $border = 1; } $subdir =~ s/\_/\//g; # define directories. my $pathdir = "${pathroot}/${subdir}"; my $htmldir = "${htmlroot}/${subdir}"; # get a random number between 1 and $maxn. my $num = int(rand $maxn) + 1; # setup the variables. my $ff = "${pathdir}/${prefix}${num}.${ext}"; my $info = image_info($ff); if (my $error = $info->{error}) { die "Can't parse image info: $error\n"; } my($w, $h) = dim($info); my $ff = "${htmldir}/${prefix}${num}.${ext}"; # print out the HTML input. print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; print qq(<img src="$ff" width="$w" height="$h"); if ($border == 1) { print qq( style="border-left:1px solid black;border-top:1px solid black;border-bottom:2px solid black;border-right:2px solid black;"); } print qq( />);

In order to use this, your web host will need to support SSI and the Perl mod Image:: needs to be installed. Feel free to use this at your own risk and good luck.