Posted by Paul McConnon
Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:19:00 GMT
I've completely redesigned the photo album on this site.
Its a much cleaner design with less visual distractions, muted colours to highlight the content and larger thumbnails. The previous album was displayed inline, within the blog layout, and the thumbnails were tiny.
The new layout is liquid; thumbnails flow to fill up the space, as would be expected in a desktop app. The layout looks particularly good on a widescreen monitor.
As with the previous album, it includes Lightbox functionality for displaying images when a thumbnail is clicked. This new album however, resizes display images on the fly to suit the size of the viewers browser window. When viewing on a large screen, images can be rendered up to 1200x1024, when viewing on a smaller screen, much smaller images are shown.
Image sizes are chosen from a list of preset sizes such that they are as large as possible, while still fitting within the browser window.
I have added an unobtrusive slideshow effect by simply 'remote controlling' the Lightbox plugin with javascript.
The album is zero administration and is always up to date. I just synchronise a folder on my computer with a folder on my server and the folders photos show up in the album automagically. The site takes care of thumbnailing and resizing itself.
Technical Info
I coded the whole thing up as a Rails plugin, the source of which I'll be putting on Github in the next few days. I have a few more tests to finish first ;)
The plugin was designed to provide the following benefits:
- Instant-on
- Install the plugin
- Add a call to the route helper and point to the required folder in environment.rb
- Navigate to the url /concept_album and you have a full working photo album
- No database required
- Lightweight info on the albums and images are cached using Rails caching mechanism
- Minimal configuration
- Set the folder to create the album for, and the location to store cached images and you're done.
- Even these are not, strictly-speaking, necessary as sensible defaults are provided.
- No maintenance tasks required.
- New images are found automatically and show up immediately. Just copy (FTP, SSH, Upload within your web app) files to the album folder and they'll appear in the album on the site.
Posted in Coding, Rails, Photos | Tags album, photo, plugin, rails | 73 comments
Posted by Paul McConnon
Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:38:00 GMT
We were out for a nice walk through the woods on our recent weekend away. I had the tripod with me to try and do some HDR images of the woods (they turned out Scheiße unfortunately!).
I set up the tripod and took a series of images of Marion, being careful not to move the tripod. I then composited them in photoshop. I assumed the compositing would be easy, but even with the tripod, tiny movements of the camera between shots made it hard work. More surprisingly, even over the space of a few seconds, the light changed quite a bit between shots.
Marion and friends. (click to View larger image)
Tags mawion, photoshop | 32 comments
Posted by Paul McConnon
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT
I was going to put my old eeepc on Ebay as I’d bought a new Advent 4213 netbook, with a more useful sized screen and built in 3G. I expected to get about a hundred quid for it.
I hated selling it though, but couldn’t think of a good use for it. I toyed with the idea of using it as a music player in another room, but my house isn’t big enough for this to make sense. I forced myself to admit that I was in a “solution looking for a problem” kinda situation.
Before I got my arse in gear and actually put the thing on Ebay, I had cause to stop using my mac mini as an always-on file-server. I needed to keep my files available on a machine on the network. I didn’t want to leave my main ‘workhorse’ PC on all the time as it’s a dual-core P4, from back when Ghz meant more than watts/hour as a measure of your cpu, and so is a noisy old bugger. Not to mention the power it would use (I’d got burned a few years ago with huge bills from leaving PC’s on all the time, and have since tried to minimise computer drain on power). I didn’t want to fork out for a NAS, although I’m sure that it would have done the trick, being low power and I’d hope, quiet.
Then it stuck me, I had the perfect low power, silent computer, perfect for serving files and I was about to get rid of it!
I switched on the eeepc, which hadn’t been turned on in months, it booted up quickly and all was well. I was actually surprised at how snappy it felt, much snappier than the newer Advent netbook which has a slower (but dual core) Atom processor. It’s got a small (4Gb) solid state internal drive, but had no other storage built-in. This is enough for the OS (Ubuntu) and some tunes and documents but not much more.
I took the Lacie USB drive from the mac mini and connected it to the eeepc, right-clicked the folders on the mounted drive and shared them as windows (samba) shares. It was a painless one-click operation. Now I can connect to my photos, movies and music from the original mac running FrontRow, my Vista laptop and my Ubuntu linux desktop. I then installed SSH and opened the firewall so that I have secure access to my files from anywhere on the internet.
I did have to run a script in order to get Ubuntu to tell the USB drive to switch to low power when it wasn’t being used, but it’s all working perfectly now, sitting quietly in the corner serving my files.
‘Happy Days’ as the man says :)
Tags eeepc, file, NAS, server, ubuntu | 30 comments
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