July 12, 2003

Canada Revisited!

After much time contemplating this move, I've decided to again re-add the Canada trip pictures. They've been on a hiatus for at least three years...and it's time to bring them back. This won't happen in the immediate future; I'm planning on merging the existing 'Canada' website into my personal Web here. But, it should happen sometime in the not-too-distant future.

In Other News...

Not too much has been happening...been busy with work and such. Prairie Pioneer Days happens to be this weekend (the big Morris annual summer festival)...so there's stuff going on regarding that.

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07

July 9, 2003

Let Pictures Be Shown!

Okay, the project is nearly complete. After doing the Perl stuff as mentioned in the last news post, I found and implemented a relatively easy thumbnail program which took all the existing images and did what it needed to do.

With that said and done, it was now time to hook all the pieces together, which is almost complete. With the exception of GeorgePictures^? (of which there are around 100), all of the existing pages have been updated with the new look (thumbnail previews). The GeorgePictures^? page will be completed at some point in time, yet to be determined. The process is somewhat slow, but it's made substantially easier due to TWiki.

In addition to this, I've also changed the master template for Matt's Home on the Web. The master table (on which the page is displayed) has been changed from 800 pixels (forced width) to 100% (relative width). The header and footer portions of the pages were like this before, but not the content portion.

I decided to do this mainly after implementing the picture thumbnails. There was too much wasted real estate with the newer layout, and it made sense to make this change at the same time. What this essentially means is that this site will now be friendly for 800x600 resolutions, with some potentially strange text wrapping in places. 640x480 resolutions are still not recommended and will experience horizontal scroll (due to image sizes), but everything else should look at least a little better.

That's all for now. Until next time...

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07

July 7, 2003

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