Create your own Personal Threat Level image just like the one used by the Department of Homeland Security

What is this?

Just your typical useless but (hopefully) fun online toy.

And, um... why?

I wanted to learn how to generate dynamic images for a website. I learn best when I have a real project to work on. This was that project.

How's it work?

Fill out the form on the right with your own text for the image title and each of the threat levels. You have 10 characters for the Threat Level headers, and 22 characters for all the other fields. Any field can be left blank, as well, if you wish. Click the colored icon for the level you want marked as "current". Use the blue shortcut icons to copy values down from the top level or reset the values back to the defaults. Click the generate button and wait a second or two and your image will be displayed in the area to the left. Lather, rinse, repeat until you get it looking just the way you want. Use the small, medium and large buttons below the image to open up and view different sizes.

How can I use the images?

Anyway you like, provided you download the images and don't hotlink them directly from here.

What do you mean "don't hotlink"?

A hotlink is an image tag that sources the url of the image on my site. When you do this, your visitors download the image from my site, using my bandwidth instead of yours. Not that I expect an earth-shattering amount of traffic, but if you were to, for instance, post a hotlink on a popular online forum, that does get a lot of traffic, the bandwidth on my little nothing server could get sucked dry in short order.

How do I download the images?

The lightbox presentation of the images interferes with the ability to right-click and save them, so the easiest way is to right-click the size buttons below the image, and then choose save link as from the popup menu. The exact wording of the menu option will depend on the browser you are using.

How do I find my Threat Level later?

The text for your Threat Level is stored in a database. After your image is generated, a link will display at the bottom of the page that can be copied and used to get back to your Threat Level should you want to edit it or regenerate it with a different current level. Occasionally, old images are purged from the site (though not from the database), so if you come back using that link and the image isn't displayed, just click the generate button again.

Why the rewrite?

To solve some flaws in the original program design, to learn some new techniques, to upgrade the development platform to the latest Rails version.

Where's the gallery?

Gone, but not forgotten.