Just added a new link to this here blog. Its my new home page. More of an application than a static home page.
http://thechums.dyndns.org:9090/cocoon/vomoir
I wrote the application in my most favoured of all the web application development frameworks: Cocoon.
I love it. Once you get your head around it, its an absolute snack to implement fairly complicated interactions betwixt user and server. You can upload photos with previews, add new links to the page, dynamically show different menu options according to your access rights etc. Its all done with XML and relies pretty heavily on XSLT to weave the magic.
I'm currently working on base64 encoding of image thumbnails. Cocoon can rescale an image on the fly which saves you having to generate a separate thumbnail but it takes a bit of a belting on the server while its processing this request. When you have a bunch of photos in your album, the app can grind to a halt or stop generating the images altogether.
I create a separate xml file that contains metadata about the image. I extract EXIF data from the photo and save salient items into the metadata xml, like date taken, image dimensions etc.
I figured that while I'm doing this, I could generate a base64 representation of the scaled image and save that as a CDATA element in the xml. I could also go one step further and XmlHTTPRequest (XHR - the cornerstone of AJAX) to display the thumbnail that's built into the EXIF data from the browser. Hmmm. Better start thinking about this.
