Lomoblog Redux

For more than a year, I hosted lomoblog.xicp.net at home via ACDSeeShare. ACDSeeShare was a good piece of software in that:

a) It shares picture folders directly and recursively. b) Thumbnails are generated on the fly.

Thus there’s NO need to generate any web albums. Just sharing the folders in ACDSee does the trick to make plain folders into browsable web albums. It’s important for me because I want to share all my 13k+ and ticking public-safe pictures without generating hundreds of albums. And the downsides:

a) It runs on its own http daemon. I have to put it on port 1863 as I run IIS on 80. b) Page layout is ugly. Not much to customize. And unfriendly to Firefox.

Despite these it’s a promising piece. I had been waiting for an update to iron out the cons. However, ACDSystems only released it for one build and discontinued. It’s totally disappeared from ACDSystems’ product catalog. And it won’t run on ACDSee 8. That’s it, my biggest failure in investing effects into a wrong piece recently. After googling for a while, I bumped into this piece of php code. It roughly does the same: directly folder sharing; on the fly and cached thumbnails. And it runs on IIS, uses CSS, and table/frame free. The downside: thumbnails are cached on disk as small jpg files. But it’s fine as long as they don’t take much space and I can purge them easily. The generating is also slow and cpu intensive. Acceptable for a one-time generation. I don’t know much php. So I manually translated the code into English via http://php.net/manual/en/ for review. There’re some security issues in the code to fix. And I have to do some tricks in order to share my picture library which is not in the same folder as the script. Naughty tricks, which wiped off half year’s worth of pictures combined with some carelessness. I’ve got to be very careful this time. Other things like tweaking titles and CSS were just smooth. So here we go: Note: If you happen to be the very first people to visit a folder, it’s going to be slow. Just wait while the thumbnails are being generated and cached up.