Fun with 1000 Rolling Stone covers, AndreaMosaic and the Deep Zoom Composer

UPDATE 08/11/2011: See post about the new archive, now also for the iPad here: archive.rollingstone.com – another feather in our cap

Having finished helping Rolling Stone magazine put their archive online (our company, AIS, together with Bondi Digital, did the Silverlight-based archive portion (more on the project later, potentially), another company did the main site), I decided to get artsy by generating a mosaic of the latest issue cover, by using thumbnails of some 1000 previous covers.

AndreaMosaic worked beautifully in creating the mosaic, and even pre-generating the starting point for a Deep Zoom image.  I opened that in Deep Zoom Composer, and generated both a Silverlight and an Seadragon Ajax version of the composite.  I then uploaded the whole shebang to my public s3 bucket.

It all took a bit of fiddling to get right, but if I had to do it again I could probably do the whole thing in 5-10 minutes…  It’s that easy. (Seriously, this blog post is taking longer…)

• Seadragon version
• Silverlight version

Of course, now that I’m putting in all the links in this post, I realize I could have simply hosted this at seadragon.com…  Oops.

UPDATE:Since MS is so kind to do the processing for me, I figured I might as well create a bigger version of this. The following is around 180MP, made up of 3000 tiles, each 300px tall... Click the full screen button in the embedded viewer for the best effect.

Update, May 12th: ...and here's the latest 2-page cover:

Uri Properties

For the life of me I can never remember what each property of the Uri class is meant to return.  SnippetCompiler to the rescue:

public static void RunSnippet()
{
  Uri foo = new Uri("http://some.domain.com/folder/file.htm?param=val#frag");
    foreach(PropertyInfo pi in foo.GetType().GetProperties()){
      if (pi.CanRead) {
        WL("{0}: {1}", pi.Name, pi.GetValue(foo, null));
      }
    }
}

Make sure using System.Reflection; and using System.Web; are is included, and there you have it:

AbsolutePath: /folder/file.htm
AbsoluteUri: http://some.domain.com/folder/file.htm?param=val#frag
Authority: some.domain.com
Host: some.domain.com
HostNameType: Dns
IsDefaultPort: True
IsFile: False
IsLoopback: False
IsUnc: False
LocalPath: /folder/file.htm
PathAndQuery: /folder/file.htm?param=val
Port: 80
Query: ?param=val
Fragment: #frag
Scheme: http
OriginalString: http://some.domain.com/folder/file.htm?param=val#frag
DnsSafeHost: some.domain.com
IsAbsoluteUri: True
Segments: System.String[]
UserEscaped: False
UserInfo:

UPDATE:  Steve Michellotti just showed me how this works beautifully in LinqPad as well, just set the language to C# Statement(s), replace WL with Console.WriteLine and you’re good to go.