jkslade.net

I need to create a design for http://jkslade.net/ (including wiki, blog, gallery), as well as http://home.jkslade.net/, which will eventually provide various site services such as a slideshow.

Anyway, I wanted to jump right into the slideshow bit, but got sidetracked with basic setup issues – subversion for revision control, and freezing edge rails. Seems like a lot of my isues were related to network flakiness…

So I set up the subversion repository for managing both the site services app (done in RoR) and the stylesheet / layout stuff. I could have just use local file:// access to the repository, but decided to set up svnserve instead. This page was most helpful for that, since my system is ubuntu-based.

Next step was to get on edge rails, and set that up as a svn:externals source — this guide is pretty clear, but there are others. It seems that right in the middle of the process, rubyonrails.org stopped responding, so I couldn’t actually test it. I decided to call it a night.

The first thing I should work on is a common layout and style across all the parts of the site. But that’s not much fun. The first think I want to work on is the slideshow app to serve thumbnail images at random in a scrolling div, and have those linked to larger-sized images. The goal is to get to where it automatically serves images from my PhotoshopElements collection instead of me having to upload images to gallery all the time.

As part of my PhotoShop Elements access effort, I found an existing script that does a lot of what I’m looking for: album2gallery.pl

This will definitely be useful for the examples, saving me time to figure out all the queries I need. I started documenting the database schema, haven’t really written much of my extraction script yet.

One thing that I am struggling to figure out, and the album2gallery.pl doesn’t seem to help… I want to know which photos are part of a stack or a version set, and only extract the image that is the top of the stack or version set. If anyone figures that out, that would be excellent to know.

I want to export some of the info from my Photoshop Elements 3 (PSE3) catalog (which is just a MS Access db) via script, so I can generate web pages, etc.

Looks like the easiest way to do this is via perl, using DBI and DBD::ODBC. I am using perl under cygwin, and I easily installed DBI and DBD::ODBC using CPAN:

% perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install DBI
....

cpan> install DBD::ODBC
....

With this in place, I wrote just a little test script to check that it works:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:ODBC:PSA', '', '');

printf "dbh = $dbh\n";

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT fImageId, fMediaFullPath FROM ImageTable");
$sth->execute();

my @row;
while ( @row = $sth->fetchrow_array ) {
print "@row\n";

}

PSE3 seems to set up the DSN as ‘PSA’ by default, with no username / password requirements — not good for security, but oh well. I was also surprised to find that this works with PSE3 running or not running — that’s something to look into further… what about other catalogs and such?

Anyway, that’s just a start. Need to understand the DB schema lots better. Eventually I’d like to get to something where, for example, I continually update a collection in PSE3 named ‘flickr’, and then a script that runs nightly to sync my ‘flickr’ collection (including captions, etc) to flickr.com, so I have one place where I’m managing that. Will I ever need to go back the other way (flickr.com into PSE3)? That would probably complicate things.