Recent Hashes page makeover

We have now made some (but not all) of the suggested mods to the "Recent Hashes" page at http://www.hashthyself.com/recent. In particular, the layout has been slightly cleaned up, and voting links are not presented for images that failed to hash (that is, images in which our algorithm could not automatically register a face).

The page refreshes automatically every 5 minutes, and displayed images are actually thumbnailed, so they load sooner.

At some point we will change the "auto-refreshed at ..." tag into a counting-down timer.

Enjoy!

-HASHers

Last refreshed tag added to recent views

On the way to refurbishing the page of recent hashes as per our stated plan :-), we have now added a tag that shows when the page was last auto-refreshed. Of course, the nicer thing would be to have a timer and a countdown, with a personalizable setting for how often to refresh. We're getting there...

Hashers

The history of Hashing (with HashThySelf)

HashThySelf is H, A, S, and H, the initials of the four founders who collectively go by the flattering term HASHers

Better late than never. Few people seem to get to this link and we often get queries asking "why the convoluted name HashThySelf?"

So, here is the story behind the name of the site (from http://www.hashthyself.com/legend)

How did HashThySelf start?

The narrator swears this ain't apocryphal.

One of the founders of HashThySelf, A, was at a dinner party in Palo Alto during the weekend of April 4 2005. His partner, M, was wearing a long white dress, a black vest and a scarf. The host stopped by them as they were sipping their drinks and remarked to M "You look very pretty in this dress... Like Catherine Zeta-Jones in `Zorro'".

"Ahem!" A interrupted. "You realize it's not very polite to compliment a person on their looks when another perfectly good looking specimen is standing right beside them?"

The host looked startled for a moment, eyes darting searchingly around A and his partner. After A cleared his throat loudly several times, she stuttered, "Ah yes, and you... you look... look shmashingly like Zeta-Jones too..."

Later that night, while driving home, M said to A, "You know, why don't we create a web search engine that measures picture similarities and gives its users a list of famous people that look like them? Wouldn't that be fun?"

The following day, A caught up with an old friend H, an expert on image processing, always receptive to A's wacky ideas. A quick feasibility check later, A brainstormed with S and the other H over lunch, realized that the service could eventually be extended to do voice-prints, for which there was enormous expertise that could be licensed from their employer, and recipes for which there was tremendous in-house need, and HashThySelf was born in name. Of course, voice-prints and recipes are yet to come, but HashThySelf is here for thine enjoyment now!

- Hashers

Notes on the page with recent hashes

Some notes about the recent-hashes page and a call for volunteers to help out :-) I'm sure we can get to all of this soon, but more hands will certainly expedite the process, seeing as we're all working folk :-)

On the recent-hashes page, we maintain a rolling list of the 100 most recent submissions from people who tried to find their celebrity doppelgangers using HashThySelf. This is a place-holder page under development, and so watch for improvements in the near future. Of course, we are open to suggestions and comments on what to put in here or how to lay it out (There might be a tee-shirt in it for you :-) especially if you volunteer to take on the task or one of the ones below!

Some of the things that are planned:

1. Only present successful hashes. If the algorithm failed to register or recognize a face, the submission won't be listed here.
2. Layout with twin frames, with the Google Ad running as a scyscraper on the far right.
3. Include a dynamically updating timer that shows when this page will be refreshed next
4. Categorize submissions by date, and present a link going further back into history to retrieve older hashes.
5. Show the user's "blurb" (a small snippet of blog-like text) along with their hash. HashThySelf users have an opportunity to enter this along with their photo on the main page.
6. Categorize/Compartmentalize the Hashes in some way to be more space-efficient on this page

Poetic error for oversize uploads

Thanks Andrew, for this beauty! You can see this when either a user submits an oversized upload or enters disallowed text in input fields.

Input Unacceptable! Upload Too Large.

A few things 'pon this earth my pages cannot handle
Amongst them images, shot with but one candle
Low-bandwidth tubes, and capricious connections
Disabled Javascript and paranoid protections

Files with forbidden names, Names with funny letters
Photos thou own'st not, those boundeth by legal fetters
Pictures of non-faces, images of bubbly babies
Files that be too small or bigger than 150 KBs

- Thy faithful Zetamaton.

Dudes et dudettes, can someone contribute a similarly flavored poem for when the input image is in a format we don't support? (Currently we can handle gifs, jpegs, bmps, tiffs and most other common formats (see http://hashthyself.com/help/formats.html). But the odd user inevitably submits non-image data, or some encoding that we don't understand how to convert (using Perl ImageMagick). There's at least one tee-shirt in this for you!

Hashers

The Anti Hash link isn't gone!

The Anti-hash link hasn't gone forever. It just moved over to create room for the recent hashes link.

We listened to the comments sent our way by our users (Thanks dudes) and decided to do two things:

1. Insert a Plain-Modern-English Help panel on the front page
2. Create a link to a page of recent hashes submitted by our users.

You can now check out who's been hashing whom at:

http://www.hashthyself.com/recent

Enjoy!

Hashers

Help panel on front page inserted

People seem to love this interface or hate it. There ain't a middle ground it seems. While many have written to us that they like the old-tyme language we adopted for this site, some have made the perfectly valid comment that the languge befuddles them, and there simply isn't anything on the front page that says what the @%&%*^! this site does :-)

We have, I hope, promptly remedied this situation by adding a help panel on the front-page. Henceforth, when you visit http://www.hashthyself.com, you will see instructions in plain modern English describing what you can do on this site.

Note, however, that the help panel is ephemeral :-) It will vanish when you mouse-over one of the buttons or the logo, only to reappear upon the next reload!

Hope that's a satisfactory middle ground?

Enjoy!

Hashers.