Hi folks,

It's time to select your favourite photo from this month's entries. Please have a look at the Photo of the Month July 2010 Gallery, and place your vote. The winning photo will be displayed on the SABRE front page and in the banner during July.

The poll will run until around 8:25am on Wednesday 30 June.

I voted for my own, but I see someone else has voted for mine as well. Whoever that is, thanks

The B road sunset and the Cambrian dual-carriageway have just run away with the competition in their wake.

Lle mae'r fordd ddeol Gymreig?

Look up Cambrian in a dictionary.

_
"Ble mae..." if you're a Hwntw.

I went for Truvelo's in the end, but I was very tempted by Halstead's.

When I typed that spelling in the word processor thought the spelling was incorrect.

By the way, I voted for myself, just to make sure I wasn't last.

The A66 in Westmorland is what I plumped for - an excellent picture.

Hmm, right in the middle of the dual carriageway. Not a place I'd go to to take a picture, although there didn't seem to be any traffic that close Nice photo though, although I didn't vote for it.

It was a different story when I took this WAI last year. A constant stream of traffic meant I had to wait ages for a gap in order to cross.

Congratulations to scynthius726 and Burns, whose photos were tied for top place this month! I've set up the banner to rotate between the two images.

Thanks again everyone and congratulations to scynthius 726 - a photo that deserved to be up there more than mine, especially considering that it was leading the way for most of the voting period.

Is this the first time there's been a tie?

Nope - I've had one photo involved in a tie, and there have been a couple of others aswell. They are rare, though.

I like the idea of the rotating banner. It's better than having each picture for half the month whenever there's a tie. It's also nice to see the new picture being posted early for once rather than two weeks into the month

I'm also pleased with the result of my picture. It shows that foreign ones are capable of pulling in the votes.

I agree, the rotation thing looks very smart.

Having said that, it does appear to change quite often and starts to become a little obtrusive. Can the delay be extended?

Yes, the rotation thing looks great. We should engineer a tie every month. Or change to a "if your photo gets 1/number-of-entries votes, it goes into the rotation" (or other quota-based) system.

What about having a rotation of the previous 11 month's winners instead of a December POTM?

The rotation is just an animated .gif which contains several several images with a delay set been each frame. I've got the GIF Construction Set on my PC which is used to create them. My avatar is such a creation although with just two frames - orange light on and orange light off.

I have a gif animator kicking about on my PC as well, though I generally just use it to give images a properly transparent background - useful for making MSN emoticons.

I find animated GIFs distracting (we've always had a ban on them in avatars), and the header image is currently 128kB. It might be better to have the website code choose to serve up a random JPG filename, like the old CBRD had random backgrounds.

In addition, some web browsers can be set not to animate GIFs or to stop the animation repeating. This will disadvantage one of the winners.

I agree that it's distracting - although I can think of far worse things on other sites (the irritating banner adverts on National Rail Enquiries immediately spring to mind). I was looking through some gallery images and kept thinking "what was that?" as I spotted the POTM image changing out of the corner of my eye. I don't think we have an explicit ban on animated avatars per se though (notice that Truvelo's current avatar is an animated GIF) as long as they're not annoying or distracting.


Yes, my iPhone doesn't usually animate gifs unless you zoom in. I've noticed this before when animated smileys stick on the first frame.


I like the idea of serving up a random image like CBRD. It's not too hard to do, except that you'd have to do the fix in 5 or 6 places, and adding custom server side code for the forums is a pain in the neck. Worth looking into?