Another long day today. And a lot more progress.
This will be exciting for Mac OS X users. I have the functioning skeleton of a new program that uploads files to the website. Right now it understands a bunch of different image formats and the mp3 music format. But I can add other types very easily (certainly other music formats are dead simple to add, but movie formats will be only slightly more difficult.)
The cool thing is that half the program runs on the client machine. Since OS X is unix this makes everything really easy - and I'll be able to install it on any Mac OS X machine. This program makes it so that there is a web upload folder on my machine. I can drag media files into this folder, and then I just load a particular web page in my browser. That starts a chain of events that uploads every file in that folder to the server, and then synchs all those files (putting them into /library/image/x/ or /library/music/x/ (or /library/video/x/...) and adding the appropriate information to the database.
The big win here is multiple file upload capability. You could just set it going on a big folder and go out for a bite. But the other win is speed. Unlike the present photo upload system, which sends the file over HTTP, this program (running on the client) makes an FTP connection to the server. This means that big files will not be a problem. It's basically a replacement for the complex music uploading system we have now (that requires a standalone FTP program on the client) and it handles photos (and soon movies) as well.
This should run on any unix based machine that can run PHP.
Of course I will continue to do my best to support all platforms, so there will always be ways to do these things from windows - I just can't guarantee it will be as easy to use.
Probably take me a couple more days to get it all polished up.
Damn, 2 1/2 hours just to get the thumbnail maker working. And that's a bit of code that *obviously* already works. Sometimes it is so frustrating. But then it feels really good when you finally see the problem (oh, I have to close the open file pointer before I can manipulate the file in a different way? D'oh.)
Opening beer. Stepping away from the computer....
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This will be exciting for Mac OS X users. I have the functioning skeleton of a new program that uploads files to the website. Right now it understands a bunch of different image formats and the mp3 music format. But I can add other types very easily (certainly other music formats are dead simple to add, but movie formats will be only slightly more difficult.)
The cool thing is that half the program runs on the client machine. Since OS X is unix this makes everything really easy - and I'll be able to install it on any Mac OS X machine. This program makes it so that there is a web upload folder on my machine. I can drag media files into this folder, and then I just load a particular web page in my browser. That starts a chain of events that uploads every file in that folder to the server, and then synchs all those files (putting them into /library/image/x/ or /library/music/x/ (or /library/video/x/...) and adding the appropriate information to the database.
The big win here is multiple file upload capability. You could just set it going on a big folder and go out for a bite. But the other win is speed. Unlike the present photo upload system, which sends the file over HTTP, this program (running on the client) makes an FTP connection to the server. This means that big files will not be a problem. It's basically a replacement for the complex music uploading system we have now (that requires a standalone FTP program on the client) and it handles photos (and soon movies) as well.
This should run on any unix based machine that can run PHP.
Of course I will continue to do my best to support all platforms, so there will always be ways to do these things from windows - I just can't guarantee it will be as easy to use.
Probably take me a couple more days to get it all polished up.
- jim 3-03-2004 2:32 am
Damn, 2 1/2 hours just to get the thumbnail maker working. And that's a bit of code that *obviously* already works. Sometimes it is so frustrating. But then it feels really good when you finally see the problem (oh, I have to close the open file pointer before I can manipulate the file in a different way? D'oh.)
Opening beer. Stepping away from the computer....
- jim 3-03-2004 4:58 am [add a comment]