She Blinded Me With Science
Jan. 7th, 2003 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kublakhanAfter several months of patiently reviewing software and trying various solutions whenever I had some free time, I've finally come up with a viable (although only a long-term interim) solution to getting all of the various family web sites updated. It's more of a "picture album in a snap" than a true content management system but, considering a majority of our updates are pictures, I'm not seeing a problem. And, while I'm sad to have to admit that most of these updates were not done by hand like much of the rest of the pages listed, the time savings alone justifies the use of automation.
A huge shout out and thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
davedujour for prompting me to finally getting off my ass and getting it done.
So y'all are gonna have to start keeping a closer eye on the family web sites (Nathan's, Celia's or mine) 'cause updates are bound to be more frequent now.
Which, unfortunately for me, means I now -desperately need something more along the lines of a content manager. *sigh* A WebFather's work is never done...
For those interested in the technical details, hang on to your horses 'cause this is almost crazy how it all comes together.
First, I load pics from the camera to my XP workstation. Yes, WindowsXP. While it is a product of the evil empire, it does have the thumbnail view and rotate-on-demand context menus that save me a whole heap of time working on the files. And, seeing as I don't bother editing the pictures themselves, it does the job I need it for and does it well. So. After the pics are loaded on XP, I rotate the ones that need to be rotated and remove the no-so-good shots.
Once that's done, I crank up Cgywin (Unix emulator under Windows) and create a file to create the captions for each picture. Then comes the long and arduous task of typing a caption for each and every picture. It's not easy to come up with creative titles for 6 pictures of the same shot only slightly different from the last but I persevere.
Once the captions are done, it's automation time. The program I use is called, simply enough, album. It generates both the images (with the assistance of ImageMagick and the HTML code for the pages. It also has the ability to do different themes but I decided to implement and make it pretty later ^_^ It's supposed to run better on a Unix machine but I decided it would be best to not tinker with my live web server and save the experimentation for my backup machine..
In about 3 minutes, the thumbnails and HTML pages are created and ready to go. Then I just copy the files from my WinXP box to the web server using the magic of Samba. I'd gotten Samba working on my test machine a while ago and had been meaning to do it on the web server and finding a page generation program I liked was enough of an impetus to finally to it.
A few deft keystrokes later on a couple of web sites and Bam! the sites are updated. Go me.
A huge shout out and thanks to
davedujour for prompting me to finally getting off my ass and getting it done.So y'all are gonna have to start keeping a closer eye on the family web sites (Nathan's, Celia's or mine) 'cause updates are bound to be more frequent now.
Which, unfortunately for me, means I now -desperately need something more along the lines of a content manager. *sigh* A WebFather's work is never done...
For those interested in the technical details, hang on to your horses 'cause this is almost crazy how it all comes together.
First, I load pics from the camera to my XP workstation. Yes, WindowsXP. While it is a product of the evil empire, it does have the thumbnail view and rotate-on-demand context menus that save me a whole heap of time working on the files. And, seeing as I don't bother editing the pictures themselves, it does the job I need it for and does it well. So. After the pics are loaded on XP, I rotate the ones that need to be rotated and remove the no-so-good shots.
Once that's done, I crank up Cgywin (Unix emulator under Windows) and create a file to create the captions for each picture. Then comes the long and arduous task of typing a caption for each and every picture. It's not easy to come up with creative titles for 6 pictures of the same shot only slightly different from the last but I persevere.
Once the captions are done, it's automation time. The program I use is called, simply enough, album. It generates both the images (with the assistance of ImageMagick and the HTML code for the pages. It also has the ability to do different themes but I decided to implement and make it pretty later ^_^ It's supposed to run better on a Unix machine but I decided it would be best to not tinker with my live web server and save the experimentation for my backup machine..
In about 3 minutes, the thumbnails and HTML pages are created and ready to go. Then I just copy the files from my WinXP box to the web server using the magic of Samba. I'd gotten Samba working on my test machine a while ago and had been meaning to do it on the web server and finding a page generation program I liked was enough of an impetus to finally to it.
A few deft keystrokes later on a couple of web sites and Bam! the sites are updated. Go me.
