Well, for my very small readership.

What I am Currently Working On

As my regulars know my main job right now is taking care of someone else. (Some commenters asked.)

But currently, while during my other job, I have been playing with Open Source photo galleries. Specifically how they display photos in slide shows. Problem is most of them use image manipulation tools commonly installed on most web servers to create thumbnails and intermediate images to display the images either in gallery fashion or slide shows. The real “full size” image is never really seen unless you allow the browser to click through and display the original image.

Of course,  a lot of people don’t know that modern browsers come with a feature enabled that dithers or displays the image sized to the browser window. Add all this to the fact that most if not all the Open Source slide show programs require all the images to be the same size and aspect ration to show them in slide show, or allow the end user to “blow up” the image resolution until  it is pix-elated, possibly viewing the image in a unfaltering fashion.

So I came up with a PHP/Ajax (server side programming that allows the browsers to call more stuff to the page it’s currently rendering without calling the whole page again, ie: the pictures), solution that just has a css menu across the top with a drop down box to choose the gallery and the images are served up based on the users screen resolution and the aspect ratio of the original. No fancy transitions, no creation of smaller images just dynamically creating the img tag and the width and size perimeters based on the real image being served up. Works cool!

Course the problem is that browsers don’t send the screen resolution to the server. Hum? Okay, I guess I will have to make this a Javascript/PHP/Ajax Project! Oh well, a work in progress!