Ideas, Pomysly, Ideen

CharString sagte:

• The images change once a month. You tell the users, but you don't tell
  their browsers or any proxy in between. Setting the Expires and/or
  Cache-Control in the response headers of the images.
  You can put these directives in your Apache config
  
  <Directory ~ "^/path/to/graphics/(omi|mmt)">
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "modification plus 1 month"
  </Directory>
  
  They can go in a .htaccess ofcourse, but for faster response disable .htaccess-parsing all together on your hosts.
• I've spent quite some time trying all layouts. Thanks to the Captcha...
  Work for me, but for your server too, generating the captcha and 2 png's for
  every layout you have available. A simple static page with examples of every
  layout would save both the users and the servers time.

Just my 2 cents...

thank you for that very usefull comments

the second one is known and it will be changed some time but the server performance is still ok even there are 300'000 active users ;)

but the expire could be a usefull thing yes :) i will try it

What about the option for users to upload their own background for the OMI, and the choice between a number of color schemes for the chart? Right now I've picked the oriental pink thing because I think it fits best with the last.fm color scheme, but I'd rather have another picture. Of course in order to prevent flooding of your disk space there should be a reasonable restriction in the amount of pictures per user (maybe except if a picture turns out to be really popular among other users), but you're storing at least 2 pics per user already, so I guess it's not really that big an impact.

Plus, I strongly agree on CharString about showing more than 1 layout at once. But apparently this had already been noticed :)

ritter_ said:
the problem with the graphic is that for each design we have a other color schema
What exactly is the problem with that? If it's about careful design, I'd change the currently available pictures *and* their color schemes as soon as possible as well (and get rid of the aliasing)... Don't get me wrong, no flame and/or pun intended, but from a design perspective they aren't the best in the world.

Like I wrote before, you could offer a number of color schemes to the end user. That, or you could "extract" a color scheme from the given image (like a gradient between the two most common colors if they are different enough, or the 20 most common colors, or the most common color with some variations applied to it, or [fill in for yourself]).