would be just good to have a seperate page for these kind of stats... the homepage is not a good place for heavy serverloads...
You're always so critical... did you read that they were cached? Nope. So what's that... 6 extra queries per day at standard settings, you could reduce that to 3 queries a day if it really pains you
oh, btw, would it be possible to have such a display for members stats in the member.php page?! would be cute too!
It is possible, included in the instructions.
However, caveat... the images generated are png's. And the sparkline library does not yet accomodate transparent backgrounds, alphas. I could change the sparkline library to work with alphas, but png's with alphas just show as grey/gray in IE.
So right now, what is happening is that I generate an image for each unique background colour that the sparklines appear on.
What this means is that if the image is used both on the members list page (alt2) and on the member info page (alt1), that double the number of images are capable of being produced.
It should be noted that the maximum number of graphs that this can render can be shown as:
# of unique background colours in enabled styles * 3 = # forum home images
+
# of unique background colours in enabled styles * # of users who have posted = # user images
In my case that allows for a maximum of 20,015 images to be created (5 styles, 4,000 users = 20,000 + 15). All are written to the file system and served from there to reduce load... I don't care about disk space, but maybe you care about having 20,015 items in a folder ?
If you add a second background colour to the equation you are doubling the number of user images you'll generate. Unless you set one or the other background colours, such that all places where the image appears uses the same alt colour... in which case, look inside of sparkplug.php and adjust the code
No point though: You should put all files for this plugin/hack/mod/whatever into a seperate folder.. My FTP is messy enough
Yes, I was thinking about that.
I wanted to keep the sparklines as a child of the forum, I couldn't trust that everyone would have a similar setup to me.
I didn't want to touch the Sparklines Library files at all, just leave their shipped files alone so it would be easier to upgrade to newer versions in future. Their files include relative includes of each other, so this means that they all have to be in the folder in which they are initially being included.
So basically they all ended up in the same place.
Not hard to move all items to a new child folder though, or possibly a sibling folder. I just didn't want to complexify the install further, I see the troubles lierduh has to go through explaining folder permissions and whatnot and end up just thinking it's more trouble than needed, stick it all in one place