New Stuff!
Well, after a somewhat uneventful Sunday (after work, that is)...I've come back on Monday (today) to do some stuff. Of course it's website-related.
This evening I modified/wrote a Perl script to display the pictures from MattPictures within a TWiki-style page. It's not actually a TWiki page, but it does look like one and functions just like it.
For some time I've wanted to do this (not just have the image load in a blank page...which is really boring). Now I can!
Anyway, I found a 'suite' of picture utilities from a free site online. I give the guy credit for his work (in the script code itself and in general) -- it's pretty decent. However, it's like 200K (a lot) of code, 5K of which I actually need. Not only that, but I wanted it configured just a little differently than he had written.
So, I took the axe to the bulk of his code, only using the pieces absolutely necessary to get the job done. With my additions and such (even comments at the beginning of the file), it's only about 4.5K. Much better in the land of Matt. Also, I know it's 'more secure' and doesn't have any additional 'side effects' I don't know about...as in, say a set of 10 files adding up to over 150K. To be frank, there was a lot of crap I had no use for...and I prefer the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. Less things to go wrong then.
I don't plan on putting this into effect, but I do have the functionality of the referral checking (as I use for the picture script for the Python website) available in the file for easy access should I decide to do that for some reason. I give people the benefit of the doubt.
I've configured the template HTML file and done the basic setup for the script, and plan to tackle the change on all the picture pages tomorrow. It'll take some configuring with a few new variables I'll have to add, etc...but it's on its way.
In addition to this, I'm planning on also adding 'thumbnails' to each picture page...to aid in the viewing. However, I have to find a decent thumbnail creator first...and that's a project I haven't really thought about much yet.
So, these changes might not go into effect until I have both of these things taken care of.
This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07