Here’s an idea that I had earlier this afternoon while playing real life frogger in traffic. (Aside: I’ve had similar productive thoughts in similar situations, I’m not sure why.) I was pondering the easiest and best possible way to go about putting a gallery of images online.
Yeah, it’s been done a million times, but I haven’t seen a solution that seems to work for me. I shy away from Gallery and other similar dynamic overkill projects after seeing a few sites get hijacked. I liked Russ’ Scrapbook, but it’s still too much work for me (I’m lazy).
So, I guess I’m proposing that it would be really cool to have a blosxom-like photo gallery. I have a feeling that this could be accomplished with a blosxom 2.0 plugin, though I haven’t looked into it enough to see if it would elegantly work or not.
One thing I’m worried about is violating the blosxom zen. A blosxom module should be fairly standalone, easy to install, without heavy dependencies and stuff like that. I just don’t know how much native image support there is in Perl. Most of the image manipulation stuff I have used in the past have just been wrappers around standalone programs that a user might not have in a hosted environment.
I’d really like to just plop some fullsize jpegs in a folder and have an index with thumbnails generated on the fly without me having to do anything. Something like that sounds like it could be a resource hog. Maybe the plugin/program could save or cache a copy of the thumbnail, that would make most of the CPU intensive stuff only happen once. That’d be cool.
I just wanted to get these thoughts down before they trickled out of my head. If someone else ends up tackling this before I get around to it, cool. Otherwise I’ll try to work on it in my ‘copious spare time’ and let you know how things go. If someone else has already done this, let me know and I’ll point to it.