Ajax Image Gallery: Lightbox/PHP

When working on a new site, I was looking for a new image gallery solution. After some loking around for Ajax image galleries, I stumbled upon Lightbox v2.02 from Lokesh Dakar aka huddletogether.com/.

It looked great and did what it should: Show images as a nice Ajax Lightbox. Problems? None other than that images couldn’t be loaded directly from a folder but you had to enter each image by hand. Solution? Yes, there was one.

In the huddletogether messageboard was one entry from Markus Steinhauer, describing a PHP script reading the image names from a given folder and encoding these for the direct use in the Lightbox Script. As it was pretty scrambled through the forum layout, I redid his work and added a second variable for image thumbnails which get loaded from a different folder. Here’s the php script to insert into your file:


<?php
function createLbFromDir ($linkname, $galname, $directory, $thumbdirectory, $extensions = array (’jpg’, ‘jpeg’)) {
$gallery = “”;
$dh = opendir ($directory);
while ($file = readdir ($dh)) {
$parts = explode(”.”, basename ($file));
$extension = $parts[count($parts)-1];
if (!is_dir ($directory . $file) && ($file != “..” && $file != “.”) && in_array($extension, $extensions)) {
$gallery.= “<a href=\”".$directory.$file.”\” rel=\”lightbox[".$galname."]\”>\n”;
}
}
return $gallery;
}
?>


To call it, you need to insert the following line (changed with your configuration):


<?php echo createLbFromDir (”linkname”, “galleryname”, “path/to/imagegallery/” , “path/to/thumbs/”);


You need to replace the four variables: “linkname” is the name of your image gallery. “galleryname” is the internal name of your gallery, if you want to insert more than one image gallery in one page, you need to use seperate name here. “path/to/imagegallery/” needs to be set to the folder where your images are; “path/to/thumbs/” should be set to the path where your thumbnail images are. The thumbnail images need to have the same names as the big ones in the imagegallery folder!

Typographic Style - on the web!

I really love good typography. A site that really helps for the web here is:

“The Elements of Typograohic Style Applied to the Web”

The site is based on Robert Bringhurst’s book “The Elements of Typographic Style” which should be on every designer bookshelf. The site itself brings good examples and how to bring good typography to your website.

Blogged with Flock

Get Ruby on Rails running on MacOsX

The best tutorial so far:

http://blog.duncandavidson.com/2006/04/sandboxing_rail.html

Great, now I’ll start programming RoR We’ll see how far it goes…

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I want those Speedbandits here…

But I suppose, Germany isn’t tolerant enough …

See for yourself: http://www.speedbandits.dk/

technorati tags:speedbandits, bikini, girls, denkmark

Blogged with Flock

Let RSS Feeds save your time…

First I was a bit of a sceptic in regards to RSS-feeds, but now RSS feeds are a big timesaver for me: Earlier I always checked websites for new posts quite daily. Most times instead of doing  what I really should…

Using Flock, I just gave it a try and “Voilá”: I don’t have to check the websites any more, a small icon tells me when new entries are available, great… saves me about an hour a day

By the way: You can also subscribe to my rss feed: http://blindape.wordpress.com/feed/

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Addictive Game Alert: Linerider

Just stumbled upon it on youtube: Linerider.

A great small flash game where you have to draw lines/ramps/hills/slopes to keep a virtual sledder on track or just let him crash against a wall

Quote: At first glimpse, it looks like a silly scrawl. But don’t let that fool
you — Line Rider is becoming one of the most popular flash games on the
web. Part Jackass stunt, part physics lesson, Line Rider encourages
users to “draw” their own ramps, hills, and slopes with a pencil tool,
then sends a virtual sledder (wearing a red scarf) along the route
until he swoops, swerves and crashes. Build an elaborate enough course
and you’ll feel like a little kid playing in the snow again, zooming
downhill, popping up in the air, wiping out on a ramp jump a la Evel
Knievel.

You definitely should throw a look at it, but just if you wanna spend the next days and nights drawing lines..

By the way: Time.com titles it “the newest time waster” here…

mydreamapp.com: The game is over!

mydreamapp.com yesterday released the results for the contest searching for the best new mac app idea.

Winners are: Atmosphere (showing the weather outside on your desktop), Portal (a sync service) & Cookbook (a cookbook application - what else?).

My personal favourite won: Portal. It can be used to sync all kinds of files between different Macs without the need for .Mac. Sounds great. Hopefully the user interface will improve a lot, but I don’t loose hope yet, as Austin Sarner, the creator of AppZapper and one of the brains behind Disco, is one of the programmers realizing the three apps…

technorati tags:mac, disco, mydreamapp

Disco! Disco! Disco!

The new darling in stylish cd/dvd burning finally is realeased into the wil through a new public beta from Monday on: Disco.

I already had the luck of beaing able to testdrive Disco and it’s so far what you would expect from a small cd/dvd burning app. What’s still missing, but will follow shortly and will be included in the final version is burning Audio CDs.

But what I really love about real Mac apps is the process of installation: Download and open the disc image, drag & drop the app to the applications folder (best is if they already have an alias to you applications folder on the disc image like they have it on the disco image), wait a second, you’re done.

And real Mac apps also have some gimmicks. The special thing when working with disco is: Smoke.

Yes, your dvd is burnt, so, there’s gotta be smoke. A great feature. You can read more about this feature on their website… here: http://discoapp.com/blog/?p=25 

And it even reacts to your mousemovements if you’re hovering over them. Nice.

technorati tags:disco, mac

MediaFire: Free File Hosting

Over at MediaFire they opened a new free file hosting service where you can upload files and provide them for download to others, for example if you need to send some file that doesn’t fit into an email.

They are promoting unlimited up- and downloads, unlimited bandwidth, mutliple simultaneous up- and downloads and you don’t have to sign in to send files -but it’s easier to manage you files if you create a free login… and you can easily create a link or email a file to someone within a few clicks per file.

Only: This all is financed by advertising (by Google ADs), there—s no FTP or WebDAV access  and you’re not allowed to:

“Submit Content that is libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic,
abusive, harassing, threatening, unlawful or promotes or encourages
illegal activity;

Submit Content that violates the rights of others, such as
Content that infringes any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret
or violates any right of privacy or publicity, or that is libelous or
defamatory, or that directs any user to the content of a third party
without consent of the third party;

Defame or libel any person; invade any person’s right of
privacy or publicity or otherwise violate, misappropriate or infringe
the rights of any person;…”

Seems to be a fair system…

technorati tags:mediafire, webspace

ActiveMeter Stats for Blindapeinc.

If you need to know how many visitors your wordpress.com blog has, but you’re not allowed to insert javascript code as wordpress.com doesn’t allow javascript due to security issues, you still can use sitemeter or activemeter which both also have free accounts available. You can then link to those if you’re embedding the code inside an image tag. See Dr. Mikes post in the forums.