[Plugin: Popularity Contest] popularity contest throwing up “blank image” in RSS Reader

Yeah, I have this same problem.

The URL for the image is:

https://www.domain.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=POSTIDNUMBER&type=feed

The id= number changes for each post. Any idea how to fix this?

Here is what I did to fix it.

1.) Upload a blank 1×1 gif.
2.) Edit popularity-contest/popularity-contest.php
3.) Search for function akpc_api_record_view
4.) Comment out the following line.
header(‘Content-type: image/jpeg’);
5.) Just below that line add the following.
header(“Location: /blank_image.gif”);

Just adjust the location to wherever you uploaded the blank gif in step #1.

Here’s a fix that’s all in code:

replace

header('Content-type: image/jpeg');

with

header('Content-type: image/png'); // set the content type
$blankimg = imagecreatetruecolor(1,1); // create an image
imagesavealpha($blankimg, TRUE); // enable transparency saving
$trans_color = imagecolorallocatealpha($blankimg, 0, 0, 0, 127); // set the transparent "color"
imagefill($blankimg, 0, 0, $trans_color); // fill the image
imagepng($blankimg); // output the image
imagedestroy($blankimg); // clear memory

The problem is that the php is sending a content type header, telling the browser that the subsequent data is an image… but then it doesn’t send any data, so the browser interprets that as a missing image. The code above simply creates a transparent 1px png and sends the data. That way you don’t need to perform a redirect as in the solution above.