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I've recently been thinking about setting up an image gallery for the 544/444 owners here at the Brickboard. I know that some of you guys have got some interesting projects going on, and I thought it might be a nice way for us to share pictures with each other. Since I'm not using the majority of the disk space and bandwidth that I'm paying for, I figured that I could set up a gallery on my website and let you guys each have an account to upload and maintain your own 544/444-related albums. You would also be able to use it to host pictures for use here at the brickboard forums.
I've already got one gallery set up on my website, so it shouldn't be too hard to set up another one. If you are interested in seeing what it might look like, you can check out my current gallery: photography.somethingsquare.com/. I need to update the gallery software though, and once I get done with that, the layout may end up looking a little bit more like this: www.freshtouringorigination.com/. The colors (and possibly the layouts) can all be altered to suit our prefences though.
If even three or four of you are interested, I will go about setting things up, and then maybe we can try it out and see how it goes. So, is anyone interested?
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Well, I was changing some configuration things on my website and accidentally screwed up some things with the gallery software. I haven't gotten much feedback on which "theme" you guys would prefer, but I think I've decided what to go with. I'm going to delete the gallery for now, and then re-install it. Once I get it up and running, and once I'm sure that everything is stable, I will activate it and let you guys know. If there's something you don't like about it, then you can complain and I will see what can be done to fix it. :-D
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I've set up most of the architecture for the gallery, and everything is live and running at this point.
Please head on over to http://roundfender.somethingsquare.com/ and check out the album titled "Themes". There is a subalbum for each potential theme that we can use. Please have a look at them, play around a bit, and let me know which theme you'd prefer.
I haven't taken any steps to include or exclude the site from search engines yet. I can take care of that once we come to a concensus on what (if anything) we want to do for this.
- What theme do you like the best? Do you have any suggestions for customizing it?
- Do you want the gallery to be included in search engines?
- Do you want your email addresses to be publicly displayed or hidden on your "profile" page? (I would suggest to hide it if we choose to include the gallery in search engines. You can always type out your contact information in your root album description if you like.)
Now, some information for you...
Some of the features I have set up:
Everyone (who visits from the internet)
- View images and albums (unless hidden or protected by album owner)
- View/Add comments
- View/Add ratings
Additional features for users (you guys)
- Access to upload (from hard drive or web page) and manage (including hide, password protect, and delete) files, select images/albums for bulk download (as zip file), edit captions (in BB format)
- Create and manage (including hide, password protect, and delete) sub-albums within your album
- Add your own personal watermarks to images in your album
Some features of the gallery software itself
- Create multiple sized versions of the original image, rotate or resize the image, crop the thumnail version of the image, use custom thumbnail image
- Member pages which show your name, email address, and most recent updates (this can be hidden or disabled, if you prefer not to have your email addresses displayed)
- Automatically reads EXIF data from jpeg file created by most digital cameras (not currently set to be displayed by default, but we can change this if you are interested)
- "Highlight" image for each album cover will change to a random image within that album every 6 hours (This time limit can be changed, or the random feature can be disabled)
- Quotas: Right now, I have 500MB allocated for the images in the gallery which is to be shared by all users. I thought this was a nicer option than setting individual user quotas, so that you can add as much as you like (assuming someone else hasn't taken up all the space). 500MB should be enough room for a lot of photos, but if we start running out of space then I will try and come up with another solution.
- Thumbnail dimension size is set to 150 pixels, default image view size is 640 pixels, additional view size is 800 pixels, max picture size dimension is 1024 pixels, no file size limit is set (although upload size is limited to ~8MB). These are the gallery-wide defaults I have set at the moment, but these can be changed if we want to, and users can over-ride these settings for their individual albums.
- Allegedly, the software can handle the following file types:
pdf, psd, ai, eps, ps, svg, tga, pcd, ppm, pjpeg, png, tif, tiff, ppm, gif, jpg, jpeg, jpe, png, wbmp, mpe, mpeg, mpg, mov, qt, asf, wmv, avi, swf
(The the purpose of compatibility and server disk space, I'd suggest that we primarily stick to jpg and gif files for images. I haven't had a chance to test how well the video formats work, so I can't make any recommendations there yet.)
Once the gallery layout/setup is finalized, I will also try to prepare a rudimentary instruction guide for using the software, so that you can get started with ease once you've created your account.
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Good luck with your project, I certainly would like to participate. I certainly have some "different" ideas that I would like to share.
I hope that this group of BBers would be a bit more careful than the current crop on brickboard or volvospeed.
Sadly, those two bbs have deteriorated quite a bit the last two years.
Volvospeed now seems to have a lot more pictures than conversation, and many posters appear to be willing to give opinions rather than facts.
Brickboard really suffers because posters do not care about the difference between "Cars", "Personal", and "Technical" any more.
This was not the case on either board two or three years ago.
One suggestion might be having a feature that allows a member to delete a mistake as cardomain.com does, or at least be able to overwrite a mistake.
--
'96 855R,'64 PV544, '67 P1800, '95 855, '95 854, the first three are mine, heh, heh, 415,000 miles put on 9 bricks
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I've spent the past too-many hours working on updating, upgrading, and migrating my old photo album to the new software, and I've finally gotten it all set up and have been able to mostly familiarize myself with it. I'm kind of "out of it" at this point, but I thought I should go ahead and make a brief update, so here goes...
I thought I'd go ahead and give some more details about what I have planned, and also to try and get some input from you guys.
A fairly basic example of what we would be using can be seen at photography.somethingsquare.com. I haven't really done much to customize it other than add a few features and tweak a few basic settings. The album I would be setting up for us would allow you to register an account, which would then create an album for you. You should be able to create and manage your own nested sub-albums, as well as captions and other features. I haven't had time to play around with the user accounts features yet, so I'm not sure just how much control/access you will have, but I would like to set it up so that all of the albums pretty much look the same--something that we can discuss and come to a consensus on later--at least by default. When you log in to your account, you would be able to upload (and delete) files from your hard drive or from another website. You can also manage the titles, captions, descriptions, keywords and other options for the images as well. The software automatically creates the thumbnails and everthing, and can also automatically create other sizes of images if specified. We can enable BB style formatting for the captions/descriptions, but I am reluctant to allow full HTML as it is a potential security vulnerability. We can allow people to comment on and vote (give good/bad ratings) on images. I'm going to be checking out some of the different available themes soon, so that we can have more choices for how the gallery will look. I'm also looking into a feature that would create some easily cut-and-paste-able code for each image, making it easier to post the pictures here at the brickboard.
Here's where I need some input though: are there any specific features you can think of that you would really like to have or that would make it easier to use?
Also, what would you suggest as an easy to remember title/name for the gallery? I plan to place it at http://title.somethingsquare.com/ (and it could also be accessed from http://www.somethingsquare.com/title/)-- where "title" is whatever descriptive/appropriate title we can come up with. I was thinking http://oldbricks.somethingsquare.com, but the 544/444 is sort of a precursor to the Volvo "bricks". But where "oldbricks" was not quite accurate enough, "volvo" does not seem quite specific enough. ::shrug:: Maybe one of those would work just fine, but I'm open to suggestions.
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Hi Andrew.
You could simply use the letter PV or the already used term "roundfender" to help identify the gallery.
Will the gallery be "read enabled" to allow other, non-registered users to access the albums?
Will you enforce a maximum image size; ie 800 x 600, to conserve space, encourage consistency and comply with most browsers and screen resolutions? Will you only support the most common image file formats; JPG and GIF, or are all formats including video supported?
Will you be implementing meta data tags or XML to allow Internet search robots to index these pages and our included text?
I agree to not enable Javascript, but simple HTML scripting tags (href, img src, b, i, hr, font) as allowed on BB should be permitted, although I know missing a closing tag or quote may mess up things a bit - been there done that!
Otherwise sounds like a great concept and one that will provide a valuable resource for those interested in getting involved with PV ownership.
--
Cam a.k.a. CVOLVO.COM
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Hi Cam, thanks for the additional feedback!
You could simply use the letter PV or the already used term "roundfender" to help identify the gallery.
I like "roundfender" so I have gone ahead and set up the base install of the gallery using that title.
Will the gallery be "read enabled" to allow other, non-registered users to access the albums?
By default I've got it set to all anyone with internet access to view all albums and all sizes of images. I can reset the defaults to restrict access if this is a concern though, and I think each user should be able to "hide" albums, password protect albums, and restrict viewing of specific sized versions of images. (I haven't tested out the registered user accounts yet, so I'm not sure exactly how much control they are given yet.)
Will you enforce a maximum image size; ie 800 x 600, to conserve space, encourage consistency and comply with most browsers and screen resolutions?
I was planning on making a max dimension of 1600 pixels wide/high, which should be more than adequate for any web-use. I might be more inclined to reduce that max dimension to 1024 pixels (to save some space), if you guys don't mind though. The software will automatically resize the image if it is too large, and it seems to do a pretty decent job of it. I was also planning on setting a 640-pixel "default size" which would be the default shown size of an image when that image is selected. There would be options for the viewer to see it in "original" (or full) size as well though.
Will you only support the most common image file formats; JPG and GIF, or are all formats including video supported?
It supports JPEG, GIF, and PNG files by default, and I've installed a module that is supposed to let it support some common video files. I haven't had the opportunity to test it out yet though. Allegedly, all of the following file types/extensions are supported: pdf, psd, ai, eps, ps, svg, tga, pcd, ppm, pjpeg, png, tif, tiff, ppm, gif, jpg, jpeg, jpe, png, wbmp, mpe, mpeg, mpg, mov, qt, asf, wmv, avi.
Will you be implementing meta data tags or XML to allow Internet search robots to index these pages and our included text?
I haven't decided on a policy for search engine inclusion/exclusion just yet. I can probably go either way on this, depending on what you guys prefer.
I agree to not enable Javascript, but simple HTML scripting tags (href, img src, b, i, hr, font) as allowed on BB should be permitted, although I know missing a closing tag or quote may mess up things a bit - been there done that!
I too prefer HMTL over BB tags, since I'm far more familiar with it, but there isn't any simple method for stripping javascript when the full HTML in comment fields is enabled. I figured that BB would still let us format the text and add links and things though.
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I'll add my name to the contributors. I'd like to see a text caption and allow HTML. If we could administer the content, allowing sub-folders, this could be more organized than just a collection of pictures; such as Steve's metal polishing technique or my yet to be published article on heat and sound deadening a PV. Great idea, go for it!
--
Cam a.k.a. CVOLVO.COM
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I have a lot of pictures of my restored 1964 544 and would certanly be willing to share them along with condition and improvememts JIM
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posted by
someone claiming to be barongrey
on
Wed Aug 30 19:51 CST 2006 [ RELATED]
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Me too. I have a ton of pictures of my own car and most of the dufferent projects I've been working on. Let me know if I can help.
Steve
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