A L D E R

Picture-per-day static gallery creation

• A L D E R
• Genesis
• How to use it
• Components
• Download Source
• Sites using Alder
• Example Gallery
• Birch
• wz_tooltip
• feedcreator

My way, or your way

The way I use it is to have the script on a web server that I have ssh access to, and use cron to schedule the script to run once per day, although this might be increased to two times per day if I find I have a lot of images to show. The idea is that once I'm happy with an image and want to show it off, I create an appropriately sized JPEG, and place it into the designated directory on the machine hosting the script. When the script runs it will choose one image file at random and regenerates all of the pages, indices and RSS feed.

You can, of course, run the script on a machine that is not directly connected to the Internet, and copy the resulting files over to your webspace. This method would work well for the free non-scriptable space provided free by most ISP's, but the drawback is that you will need to ensure the files are copied over.

Requirements

You have to have a *nix machine (Linux, *BSD, OS X, etc.) and will need to make sure that your version of PHP has the exif and pcre modules compiled into it (check with php -m) and that you have ImageMagick and jpegoptim available in your default path.

Note that to get text to appear beneath the image you will need to embed an IPTC Caption tag.

Depending upon the state of your php.ini file, you may have to add the line:

allow_call_time_pass_reference = On

in order to allow the exec() call to correctly return a file list. This wasn't an issue on the default OS X 10.4.9 version of PHP, but it was for a NetBSD ports build variant.

Included files

The download tarball does include programs that I didn't write - look at the components page for more information on each of those parts.

Known Limitations

• The tooltips have a solid colour background in Safari. Firefox correctly renders the background as translucent.
• Internet Explorer has not been tested at all (if it works, then great, but have you not considered switching to something more standards compliant ?)
• The HTML generated has a terrible lack of indentation by design, to help keep file sizes down
• The default themes don't work too well with images larger than 600x450
• Comments are only extracted from the IPTC Caption tag
• Aperture generates bad EXIF data according to PHP's EXIF parser, and each run will generate many non-fatal errors
• All index.html files are rebuilt every time the software is run, which is inefficient for very large sites - this will be addressed in the near future
• The RSS2 image feed has no formatting, which makes it a little dull

License

This software is BSD licensed.

This software uses the CSS files and navigation images from Birch, which is BSD licensed (see README.birch for full details); wz_tooltip which appears to be freely useable (with a donation request) and FeedCreator.class.php is LGPL. The original unmodified wz_tooltip and FeedCreator files are included in the download, in the contrib directory.

© 2007 Ian Spray Contact Me | Design by SmallPark