The initial version of this site was done manually. Right after Val was born, I scanned in a bunch of pictures, uploaded them, and built a page around them. I had just done the website for the Cell Imaging Core, so I was in HTML mode at the time.
Thus it stayed for many a day... nearly a year... because it was a lot of work to do, and I didn't have much free time.
What I've done now, is to put a bit of effort into automating the page creation. I found a script on the web called HTMLThumbnail, which I've modified a bit, and which will now make pages out of a directory full of images (JPEG files).
The idea behind this is that now, all I have to do is scan the pictures and upload them; I can make the page with very little work after that. With any luck, this will lower the "activation energy" barrier, and lead to more frequent updates- which is important, now that Val's doing something new every day.
In case the modified script could be of use to anyone, I'll make it available here, once I get the original author's permission. It still needs a bit of refining, since I've introduced some sloppy code as a quick hack to get it to do what I wanted.
Here are some notes on what I still need to work on:
in each subdirectory full of images, script should make a page with: get title of group from file called title.txt in subdirectory get blurb from file called blurb.txt make thumbnails of each image, and paste into the page -- this part done well (linking to page rather than image) -- done also, make a bare page for each one (slides to web) --done with header, image, name, buttons for previous, next, index (unless first or last) --done (should also send size of image, and maybe alt. text as arguments to sub) insert buttons to next group, previous group, or at least common index page (home page?) --can this be done? maybe remove htmlthumbnail blurb? link in modified version? Contact author? add link to my home page? put in the modification date? Hey, this is going pretty well! Maybe I should learn perl's web functions (module?) or CGI or PHP... Maybe I should be composing these with a program? notes- change all pages, links, scripts from htm to html Need to stop listing sizes, but send them to page making routine most of the 60 jpgs in vandy/jhs/images can be deleted; but not (yet) others' and bigvalthumb... and others? Redo others. Do House! Improve boat! More recent pics (from emails-on monback) and CDs (and old zips?) Put Thinkpad notes there... clean up milou "back'"s on pegresearch, pegasus, Val's pics Find Brian's page can I center pics in table columns in index? can I improve font for wombat poem? can I color background of table columns? send out update to people who'd care
You know, if you've read all that, maybe I should just hire you to write my pages for me!
Back to my home page.
Oh, and don't worry about the animals. There's no hidden meaning to the pictures, they're just for decoration. No animals were harmed in the creation of this website.