Recent stuff
A short update of what's been happening recently.
Problems with the video players
The video players on the Movies-age are currently broken in Firefox. Quite annoying since the issues are with the pflash player I'm using for the task, which worked just fine in prevous FF versions and suddenly broke. I updated the player to latest version but that one seems to bug with Firefox as well, requiring refreshing the page to get the videos to show adn only actualy laoding those videos that are currently visible on the screen correctly.
On the other hand, I haven't been able to find any other player with similar features and ability to do all the configurations in the page code instead of having to work with Adobe Flash to create aplayer for each video separately. I can only hope that this player gets fixed soon or that I find some similar player soon..
The continuous state of stillness
Nothing much going on this site, I have too many ideas what I'd like to do to this site, and too much time to think for new ideas and draw new designs... I suppose not having a deadline is the worst thing that can happen to a project. :)
Refreshed pilvipisara.fi online!
For this page I did some graphical adjustments while maintaining the original design. And also a complete rewrite of the code for easier maintenance and updates. Not to mention the web shop, which was qite a interesting thing on it's own. How to create a database-based web shop without actually having a database available.. (If you want to know I ended using some XML files to store all the data).
pinjaschonberg.net is online!
I made a web site for my sister Pinja, and it turned out quite nice. Check the page at http.//pinjaschonberg.net
Kp-Ideat.fi online!
The web site for finnish theatre and TV production company, KP-Ideat is online: KP-Ideat.fi.
Doing repetitive tasks on computer means you're doing it wrong
Computers are far better than I am at repeating same task over and over again hundreds of times. Like, for example, the job of compressing, resizing and processing hundreds of photographs into web-usable pictures, and then writing HTML code to add all these pictures into web page.
Having realised this, I wrote a Linux shell script that creates a web gallery from a folder of images. Scripted image processing and HTML code generation allows doing more complicated stuff than what you'd want to do by hand when there are large numbers of pictures involved. The gallery script also uses EXIF data saved by digital cameras, showing original capture dates. It uses Imagemagick and a bunch of standard Unix tools which means it should be portable to OS X with some minor changes. The resulting gallery is static XHTML Strict with CSS, something you can use with pretty much any web hosting service. The script also supports dual-core CPUs, processing large images and thumbnails at the same time to get the task done twice as fast. Check the example gallery here: California Gallery.
Since Imagemagick can also be used together with PHP, the next obvious step would to turn this into fully web-based CMS for photo galleries. I'd also like to show more information from the EXIF data in the user interface, but the current simple design doesn't really work well with loads of text. But I'd also like to have option for simple layout that brings focus to pictures themselves so that would mean creating support for user selectable themes..