Reverse engineering

Last week, while waiting for a compile, I toyed with a few MT plug-ins and must admit that few of them interested me much. The weather plug-in is nice but completely pointless since it's a static web page and only updates when you rebuild the web page not when someone visits the page so I'll probably remove it. The book queue plug-in is a bit nicer but doesn't download and store the thumbnails and doesn't have a small synopsis field either. Maybe I'll rewrite it for a full books section.

The one thing I've really been wanting for two years now is a decent photo display application. Everything I've seen is either too busy, too complex, too slow, too annoying or too something or other. However, I did find PhotoStack a few weeks ago and got excited since it was an application made to emulate the texism photo gallery which I have always found very attractive.

The strength of the textism photo gallery is that it is very simple in its presentation and allows the photos to stand on their own. Sadly, PhotoStack is written in PHP which I simply could not get fully operational on either OS X or Solaris with Apache and mod_perl. I could use a lot of foul language to describe my 3 days of attempting to get the application to work but I feel somewhat vindicated that even Jarkko had a similar ordeal with another PHP application.

So, given the PhotoStack application and the HTML and CSS from Textism, I'm just going to reverse engineer the sucker in perl and mysql and see how it goes.

12 Jun 2003 at 12:38, Helsinki