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Replacing ‘imageindex’ with my own software: part 2

Over the weekend, I finished the first pass at ‘mcphotoweb’. It generates basic photo albums. On the web server side, I’m using javascript to expand the medium-sized images from the thumbs and the full-size images from the medium-sized images. It works, and the presentation is nicer than what ‘imageindex’ produced. The javascript is hackish, but it works. For an example, see my August 30, 2007 album from the 2007 BMW Z Homecoming.

The next round will probably emit XML files with more meta-information, which will enable some of the EXIF details of photos to be shown.

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Indexing my web site for search: part 4

Why do I get the feeling this will be a never-ending blog series? Perhaps because my javascript skills are still at the novice level?

I’ve finished my tweaking of the search interface for now. When a search is started from a non-search page, I give the user the search page with results. Once on the search page, up to 5 previous searches will be saved (in browser memory via jQuery calls and some other javascript), and may be flipped through by clicking the search results title (“N matches found for …”). I may change this number in the future. At the moment it has little effect on browser memory consumption, and is very handy for flipping through search results for different search terms.

You can check out the search page here.

My javascript foo is getting better, as is my CSS foo. It won’t be long before I move from procedural javascript to OO javascript (as unintuitive as its syntax is for OO, it works).

I like jQuery and the yui library.