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 Read more
