Catch your kid doing something right: Our son Cameron and the upgrade path of SlideShowMarge

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been building web pages and web sites for clients since I started as a Realtor. In the dark days of the early millennium, email services — especially AOL’s — were unreliable. Plus which, who wants to receive four megabytes of photos by email?

And while building a one-off web site to show off houses sounds like a lot of work, it really isn’t. If I had previewed ten houses, I would end up with a folder on my hard disk containing ten subfolders, each with the photos I had taken of a particular house.

In the Mac world, to get a list of files, you just Select All in the folder and Copy. When you Paste in a text file, you get the filenames in the order you had them sorted, one to a line.

From there it was easy to run two Search and Replace operations to recode the filenames as HTML img calls. Chop and drop that code into a standing dummy web page, type a headline and any needed body copy, and save the edited file under the name “index.html” in the same folder as the photos.

Voila! Instant web page. Do that in each of the ten folders of photos, then do it with those folders in the top level folder. In about twenty minutes’ time, I could build a web site full of photos.

Okayfine. But I can write all kinds of elaborate code from scratch. And, perhaps more importantly, I can catch my own mistakes. What about normal people, born into this world without a propeller beanie?

About fifteen months ago, I wrote a piece of software in PHP called SlideShowBob (I named it after Side Show Bob, Krusty the Clown’s sidekick on The Simpsons, and I am very far from being the first dink to think up this dumb joke).

Here is what the original SlideShowBob did: It took a folder full of photos already stored on the file server and built a web page from them, prompting for the headline and body text. We could do ten folders of photos in ten minutes or fewer. But SlideShowBob couldn’t handle folders of folders to build a web site.

This is where our son Cameron got involved. He took my code and rebuilt it as a tool we called SlideShowMel (after Krusty’s second sidekick). SlideShowMel would recurse through a folder of folders (or a folder of folders of folders, etc., ad infinitum) and either create a web page from a folder full of photos or create a page of links to the folders contained within a folder of folders. SlideShowMel also offered photo captioning, a very nice innovation. Our more elaborate single-property web sites were made possible by the SlideShowMel technology.

But what’s the trouble with web sites? You always need to add or remove or change something. In particular, we often add new folders of photos to sites we build for buyers. Enter SlideShowMarge (named after Krusty’s sidekick for a single episode). Marge did everything SlideShowMel did, but she also allowed editing or amendment of an existing Marge/Mel/Bob site or page.

Meanwhile, I had become enamored of the idea of modular web pages, pages built using PHP’s “include ” command so that the look and feel of an entire web site could be changed simply by changing the HTML in the component modules. SlideShowMarge was upgraded to do this, permitting us to build single-property websites as WordPress weblogs, for instance.

I fell in love with a JavaScript-based slide show program, so I prototyped it out and Cameron built it in.

Just lately, he revisited everything to make a full SlideShowMarge web site run out of a single AJAX-like web page. I recast a site we built for our friends, the Pawlenkos, to illustrate how a site built by the upgraded Marge runs.

What’s interesting about this, is that, using SlideShowMarge, anyone can build, update or edit a full web site with no knowledge of HTML. The software does all the scut work, quickly and without errors.

Cameron’s next challenge — really not much of a challenge — is to incorporate all of this into a WordPress 2.1 single-property weblog. Appearance, look and feel, fit and finish are all completely modular, and the slide shows will run AJAX-like in any window big enough to contain them.

It’s our kid building all this. He wastes a boatload of time playing video games, and he doesn’t always do his homework. But he’s a rockin’ web programmer, even despite himself. When he finally gets hungry, he will be a force to contend with…

 
Getting in touch with your inner geek:

• Apprehending Realtor 2.0: Seven essential skills of the 21st century real estate agent…
• How to make fast, flexible web pages…
• Catch your kid doing something right: Our son Cameron and the upgrade path of SlideShowMarge
• How to make Google your weblog’s best friend…
• Speaking in tongues: Presentable PHP in WordPress
• Speaking in tongues: Dynamically updated lists of links in PHP
• Speaking in tongues just for Cheryl Johnson: Building content-rich custom web sites in PHP
• Speaking in tongues for Morgan Brown: A quick and dirty contributors’ blogroll
• Speaking in tongues: A step-by-step guide to speaking in web sites

Want more? Real Estate Weblogging 101 will speak to your inner geek. And if you want even more than that, be sure to join us for BloodhoundBlog Unchained.

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