Oats for Tanger

Posted on December 30, 2002 by Pete Ashton

Oates for Tanger is a nice photoblog notable for the innovative thumbnails that aren’t actually thumbnails. Rather Alan crops a strip of the photo and uses that. The resulting page is a collage of seemingly random strips of image that when clicked take you to proper photographs. Neat.

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9 Responses to Oats for Tanger

  1. Alan Cowderoy says:
    December 30, 2002 at 2:24 pm

    Thanks for the comments and link, glad you like the blog.

    There were a couple of ideas behind the main page set up.

    First I very much wanted it to look like a blog not like a photogallery.

    Several sites do this ok but with whole photos on the main page which inevitably limits the number and size of entries on the page before it gets unwieldy.

    There are others who use hand cropped extracts. I’m not keen on that either as I wanted a system where I could automate the upload.

    So once I decide a photo is ok to publish I wanted to be able to post automaticaly. No fiddling in photoshop, no handwritten html, not manual ftping.

    This is in fact relatively simple. The whole thing is generated by a couple of perl scripts that use image magick to produce the strip, the main version and an html/text file linking the two together and then ftp it all up to the server. Blosxom handles the rest.

    So I just pick which of the photos i’ve taken I like and then hit the “publish” button. Works for me.

  2. Pete says:
    December 31, 2002 at 10:15 am

    Sounds perfect. Having just spent about three hours getting the Grandma photos online something like that would be a bonus (though you can’t automate cropping…).

    I wonder when these kind of scripts will become “mainstream”? There’s the iPhoto Mac app that lets you put your photos online automatically but it doesn’t do weblogs, I think. And MT does have a facility for uploading, resizing and linking images. I guess it’ll happen soon.

    Thanks for the info though! Top stuff.

  3. Damian Cugley says:
    December 31, 2002 at 6:12 pm

    I like the idea of automating the random cropping. I use something like this at home for a different purpose: I have a program that grabs a random photo from a directory, crops it randomly, expands it by a randomish amount, force-maps it on to a very subdued colour palette, and then makes it my desktop background (wallpaper). It runs every hour so I get an ever-changing arty wallpaper.

    The ideal thumbnail in theory will often use both cropping and resizing, because you will want to pick out a detail for the thumbnail that would be lost if you shrunk the entire picture. That takes human intervention though, so few people bother…

  4. Damian Cugley says:
    December 31, 2002 at 6:17 pm

    … For example, I create the icons used for Jeremy Dennis’s weekly strip by hand, and they are (obviously) small details extracted from the strip as a whole, and shrunk a bit as well.

  5. Pete says:
    January 2, 2003 at 5:22 am

    I’ve just been plugging Jeremy’s TWS RSS feed into the new BugPowder page and it occured to me, wouldn’t it be cool if those icons were part of the feed? Wouldn’t it, huh?

  6. Alan Cowderoy says:
    January 2, 2003 at 9:02 am

    Nice idea from Damian for the wallpaper, like it.
    The cropping on my images isn’t entirely random I hit a band just above center which is pretty much guaranteed to have *some* of the subject in it assuming the picture actualy has one.
    I did notice a few other systems around that handled pictures but I realy wanted to use Blosxom as it’s so drop dead simple and leaves everything in ordinary text files so it’s easy to hack on.

    Did you try my RSS feed? http://www.cowderoy.com/cgi-bin/alan/blosxom/abroad/xml
    it does just as you mention – serves up the thumbnails.

    Can’t automate cropping .. Yes but my answer to that is to compose in the camera, take lots of shots and throw away everything that doesn’t work straight out of the box. That’s one of the advantages of using a digital camera imo. It’s true though that I want a more ‘shoot from the hip’ style rather than anything too composed. Just like with ordinary blogs, some people spend hours composing, others just bash our what ever goes past. I’m resolutely in the latter group.

  7. Pete says:
    January 2, 2003 at 9:19 am

    RSS feed – cool. I’ll have a look at it.

    I’m interested in this because I’m thinking about using RSS for online comics, specifically stripblogs. I wonder, do many photobloggers put their thumbnails in the RSS feed? Something to investigate.

  8. Alan Cowderoy says:
    January 2, 2003 at 11:15 am

    I’ve not seen anyone else doing this. It earned me a nice comment from Mike Krus of newsisfree (http://www.newsisfree.com/blog/archives/000255.html#000255) so plainly he hadn’t seen it before either.

    If your posts are pictures rather than text then it seems natural to want to put thumbnails in the feed. In fact doing so involves nothing more complex than putting the image tag in the post used to generate the feed. It’s not wildly kosher but it works.

    I had the problem that I didn’t have any text to use as a title which was invalidating my RSS feeds. After discussing it with the guys at http://www.syndic8.com/ I modified blosxom to produce RSS version 0.94 which is the only one that accepts blank title tags. Just one to watch out for.

  9. Pete says:
    January 2, 2003 at 12:16 pm

    I’m a bit naive about RSS validation, but I did a similar thing to get the photoblog thumbnail on the main page. The MT plugin just ignores the title. That feed isn’t really intended for syndication though – it’s more of an internal thing.

    I suppose you could put the date as your title and that would get around the issue.

    Thanks for the coupla links there. Didn’t know about syndic8.