Theledge.net

I sat down and, while listening to a mixture of Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash, hacked together an Atom feed for Buddy’s site. It was an enjoyable morning. If you use an RSS reader (I use RSSOwl, Angie uses Sage for Firefox) you can now add a feed for Buddy’s pictures, so you will see them when they update.

The reason I programmed this little hack was that I wanted to put a static page in this website (à la the baby page and our vows) that showed the most recent picture of Buddy. This was, of course, a warm up for the extremely likely scenario that I will take tons of pictures of the baby and want to do the same thing.

The reason I used an Atom feed was because I thought it might be more useful than custom-built method (that is, I took the “Long View”), and it had the added benefit that Angie could subscribe to the feed.

But I forgot that Serendipity doesn’t actually have any capacity to parse Atom feeds yet. So, while the morning was fun, it leads to the question:

1) Should I abandon the Atom feed, and redo it in RSS (I have not used the Serendipity aggregator, so I’m not sure if this is a good solution)?

2) Should I extend the aggregator plugin to support Atom (if it hasn’t been done yet, it ain’t easy)?

3) Should try to build a simple Atom parser (ha!) and just toss a custom plugin together for myself?

I’m going to have to think about, but all I can think right now is “So much for taking the Long View”.

Ok, I’ve added a new version of the usergallery plugin to CVS.

It has configurable title and subpage control, and when it is used with a recent 0.9 build, it will allow the user to set the directory to display.

And thanks to Stefan Willoughby it now offers a thumbnail view with pictures opening in a new window, which allows the user to control which directory is viewed! (Which sounds kind of like this idea...)

Wow... I was totally wrong...

The updated usergallery plugin is mostly done. I need to do some more testing, and Stephan has some code for me to add but it is basically finished. I spent more time trying to get TortoiseSVN working with Berlios than I did on coding...

Note: TortoiseSVN needs an external ssh client... SSH Secure Shell 3.2 seems to work well if you are non-commercial. Interestingly, the license file which comes with the packaged installer makes no mention of non-commercial licensing, so I will probably look around for another ssh client inside thirty days.

Anyway, once I dug into serendipity_displayImagelist() I realized it was really easy to restrict the directory tree. Mostly this is because serendipity_fetchImagesFromDatabase() and serendipity_traversePath() are well coded, and respect paths nicely. All in all, it turned out to be a seven line patch to restrict the directory and to get it working with permalinks below the main directory.

Rewriting the usergallery plugin took a little more time, but wasn’t too big of a problem. I will update CVS in a couple days, once I’ve been able to test it a bit. SVN was updated tonight with the patch and hopefully I don’t have any mistakes which would cause it to be pulled (seven lines, I should hope not... If there is I may have to stop fooling myself that this is a good hobby and pay more attention to our yard).

Ok, I’m hooked on fixing the user gallery plugin. I’m going to dig around in core and see if I can clean up displayimagelist(), but I’m going to be taking it slowly, because I don’t want to introduce any security problems.

Thanks to Stephan for prodding me a bit. He is working on a plugin which sounds like it will bypass the core function in order to present the images. Hopefully he isn’t too mad that I am going in a different direction. If he gets it all working it will bridge the gap nicely until I get everything working the way I think it should. Plus, I’m pretty bad as user interface, so it’s always nice to see what other people are doing.

In the mean time, I’ve got a patch to fix the permalink root directory problem, and have started on restricting the directory level.

And Stacie (an old co-worker) called and wants to do lunch! So I’m headed out to relax a little.

Then I need to start working on the dresser I am stripping for the baby’s room.

I posted a new version of this plugin in CVS. It now supports permalinks (in the root directory only), and uses css to present image information (so the picture is centered).

Thanks to Heather for the help/recommendations.

Unfortunately, this plugin is severely limited by it’s reliance on Serendipity core functions. But I do feel it is important to continue using the core functions, or else it will end up a bloated mess like Linklist.

I’m going to give it a little time and see how much the problems bother me. If they bother me enough I will probably dig into serendipity_displayImageList() and see what I can do.