Cafe Bucky

Just a quick note to say that there are a couple things going on under the front page covers of FlexiPhoto.org. It’s such a soft launch, that I’ll make you copy/paste the URLs :-)

• Wiki @ http://www.flexiphoto.org/fpwiki (my next task)
• Blog @ http://www.flexiphoto.org/fpblog/

Downloadable code of a very early alpha does exist. You can ask me where that is, and I’ll provide a couple of notes on it. It’s only there as a stake in the ground — something to look at on a spare, non-production personal machine (no authorization yet, obvious bits of security to address, etc.)

From this point on, I will write most of the FlexiPhoto blog stuff over on that site, and will link to postings from here. I don’t want to overly clutter up my personal blog with the project …

I’ve been a busy bee, porting FlexiPhoto to PHP 5, and generally rearranging some of the internal structure of the app. I’ll be looking for people that want to try out a photo database. This goes beyond some of the simple galleries out there, in that:

• Photos are searchable by keywords, captions, and comments
• Collections are groups of one or more photos
• Photos can be moved amongst different Collections
• defining a new user interface is straighforward, and can coexist with other UIs. Each UI can be available in multiple languages
• Photos can be retrieved directly from FlexiPhoto, with arbitrary scaling and quality, so that they can be embedded in any web page (there’s a “get photo” url)
• Doing Flash and AJAX front ends will not be hard. I’ve already done a simple flash gallery that taps into FlexiPhoto.

I’ll have more to say on Monday, or before. The initial version of 2.5 is going to be very alpha. One motivation for this posting is to give myself an initial cut-off date for getting the new web site going. More soon.

Just wrote an entry about embedding photos in arbitrary web pages

You know, like:

scale 10, quality 10…

or:

scale 5, quality 90…

Announcing a blog focused on the development of FlexiPhoto:

http://www.flexiphoto.com/blog

This is another piece of the puzzle towards getting that project going: a focused spot to make annoucements, solicit feedback, and so on.

brief definition: FlexiPhoto is a web-based photo database.

There’s a preview version of the FlexiPhoto source up on the site!

I’ll make it more obvious soon. More docs are on the way. Ask me if you want to get the version that’s there now. The key word would be “downloads” :-)

The goal this weekend was just to put a stake in the ground; to just get to the point where I felt like I had settled on a license, that I had something functional, and that I knew I’d gotten the ball rolling.

So that’s a big relief! It’s good to get something non-trivial out there.

First off, I want to say thanks to the folks that have taken a look at the FlexiPhoto preview. If you would like to see what I have so far, and try it out for yourself, email me, and I will send you a login and password.

I’ll be updating the preview version soon. There is “get” functionality, which lets you embed photos in arbitrary web pages that come from FlexiPhoto. The photos can have arbitrary scaling and compression. FlexiPhoto caches the scaled/compressed versions.

I want to get the source out there, as I’ve written before. Just wondering which license to use.

Or, New York With A Drawal …

Gosh, I’ve been away from here, but I haven’t gone anywhere at all.

I have some of my usual routine back. Loud Music and Coffee. I am definitely going through a post-NYC withdrawal. The energy level here in Petaluma is akin to the slow bits of Dave Grohl’s/Foo Fighters “How I Miss You”.

The point today, aside from writing “no, I didn’t forget my blog”, is this:

I want to figure out which Open Source License to use for FlexiPhoto

The basic constraints are that I want to control what gets called FlexiPhoto, I want to be able to do consulting on my own project (and have others feel free to do the same), and I want the source out there. FlexiPhoto is a non-trivial project, so I am taking some care to get this bit right.

Got any suggestions?

And my other point today is that I am looking to open up the FlexiPhoto preview, but I am not keen on having random strangers posting iffy stuff (so I need to have some sort of basic authentication).

Hey it’s November. Happy November.
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