MRTG colours

After hard work with my custom MRTG collectors, its time to make some fun with MRTG: COLOURS :-)

To make the charts more funny, we need to know what options we have to add to mrtg.cfg, and what to put as arguments.

Options

There is an option for definition of colour of lines, another for background of web page holding the charts and one nice option to input some custom string at the top border of chart (title and date/time):

Options[bbc.response]: ..., ..., ..., pngdate
PNGTitle[bbc.response]: Response time of http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Colours[bbc.response]: DIRTY YELLOW#E6B420,ORANGE#E65120,THIRD#993615,FOURTH#997815
Background[bbc.response]: #1A1A1A

Here are four colours: a pair for collected data and a pair for additional lines. The names are user defined and we use them later in description at the bottom of the page.

Colour blending

Coding was easy, now WHAT colours to use? Very helpful are sites with application to blend colours. I prefer these: Color Scheme2, Color Blender or Color Schemer


The first offers contrast colour set, especially useful for MRTG.

Bottom of the chart page

At the bottom of auto generated web page are descriptions of colours. By default the names there are: GREEN, BLUE, DARK GREEN, VIOLET. If you change your colour codes in Colours[title], it would be nice to make according changes in the colour names at the footer description. In the examples above colours are: DIRTY YELLOW, ORANGE, THIRD and FOURTH.

Additionally you can make custom description at the bottom of page, which differ from image, because there is more space for explanation:

Legend1[bbc.response]: Average time of retrieving 3 news stories
Legend2[bbc.response]: Max time from 3 retrievings

GIMP tutorials list

It isn't peace of cake to find good GIMP tutorial on YouTube. That's why I try to list here some of them. Tutorials listed here are or good as a step-by-step prescription for some tasks, or can be inspirational for you.

• Makeover (score 2of5) - good quick how-to use different tools to mask defects (digital maquillage)


• Superfast makeover (score 3of5) - as often, more impressions then tuition, but if you pause every 5 seconds, you can find what tricks he is using. Much better then average.

If you find a tutorial on YouTube, please remember, that 90% of the material is amateur, without polishing final effects. For example, many tutorials about changing hair colour don't mask sharp borders. But it isn't though to take eraser (<Ctrl+E>) with opacity 50% and soft edges.

Nice GIMPing.

Utility graphics

Last web surfing conducted me to much better source of fresh news. And no, its not digg.com. Its Delicious. As the name suggests, its pretty good set of links about fresh topics. Wandering from link to link I eventually landed on graphics site. A surprising simplicity and correlation of elements I couldn't match provoked me to do some my own attempts.

Update 2008-06-25
Its not possible to learn on somebody else mistakes. We can learn only on our own. That why there no step-by-step guide how to create something requiring creativity. Have a vision and use proper tools. But as a general guide I could use this Jacci Bear's tutorial from about.com.