If you’re seeing a boring directory listing, wait another hour or five til the DNS change has propagated… we changed nameservers last night, Sydney time, so it should be through soon.
Be the first to comment on it over at the cat-scan blog!
N.B. If you haven’t got working DNS yet, try http://209.59.176.82/~catscan/blog/ and http://209.59.176.82/~catscan/. Links will be broken using this method.
Wow… looks really good. I like the visual design/aesthetics. I’m curious to see who the target market is, for Cat-Scan. And I’m intrigued by the lack of a database — what were the reasonings behind that, and benefits.
Good stuff. It’s definitely something I might utilize.
Hehe, I think we’re curious to see who the target market is! Depending on community response when we hit 1.0, we might think about launching a ‘consumer’ (probably hosted service) version, but 1.0 will resolve a fair few setup/administration usability issues, so that mightn’t be necessary. Plus, in the face of services like Flickr, the hosted gallery market isn’t great :P
The lack of a database essentially means simplicity, and a lower entry level. Entries are parsed line by line from a textfile, with data separated with colons — it’s human-readable, human-editable without special tools, and saved (in earlier stages of development) the inclusion of an administration interface (because it’s unreasonable to assume people will sit in phpMyAdmin and do things there, great tool though it is).
By ‘lower entry level’, at least here in Australia the free web space some ISPs give their customers often sports PHP, but rarely supports a database (except for if you pay an exorbitant fee, etc.) This opens PHP up to them, as well as people who might just be playing with PHP on their computer at home and for whom setting up a database server, etc, simply seems too daunting.
This also means it’s not dependent on a homogenous environment. Mostly, people talk about LAMP, but sometimes the MySQL in that is replaced with PostgreSQL or even MSSQL/Access (where the server is Windows). It’s possible to code multiple database support into an app (I think phpBB does it?), but it bloats code, which is something this project tries to steer away from.
It comes down to portability and bloat-avoidance. You’ll note there’s no ability to rate photos, to comment on them, to ‘tag’ them. It’s possible at some point in the future some of these things might happen, but it will be hard to do that without becoming like (with the exception of the pretty-near-perfect semantic markup, which is rare in an image gallery) all other offerings. Less is more.
I’m thinking we should setup a forum or, as Dale suggested, a mailing list, but that might be too high maintenance and I don’t want to think about it til December.
Yeah — I agree with the “simpler is better” concept. I like that idea — and I’m tired of seeing so many web apps that are similar to others. I like your idea… I like that it can be downloaded, and run in a local environment. That’s the key.
As you say, if you start to apply features like commenting, tags, etc — you become more like other web apps already available — but if you can do that, and still allow for downloads, and having it run in a local environment — I think that’s a big advantage, over other apps, that are strictly “web based.”
Especially for developers — who could download the code, and customize things to their liking.
Indeed. Just in case there’s any conclusion, it’s not an app I wrote (though I’ve kinda steered the semantic markup thing a little bit).
DAMN MONKEYS! They must’ve ate the comments section too.
I tried to post this on the new cat-scan blog —->
Does this mean you’ve given up on the cat-man / kitten-man weblog?
Looking nice, though the cat looks a teeny weeny bit munted…Oh well, what ever catches your fancy. I know I can’t really talk seeming as my sites not done-up yet. On that note… Josh as the resident CSS Nazi, how on earth did you get the round corners in??? I know there are several ways to do this depending on which language you use, but I’ve been having some seriouse arguments with my computer with regards to getting this to work (without using javascript). What would you recommend?
Good to here to going to make the monkeys redundant — they keep eating my bananas. Sometimes I get this small issue where they kill the links in the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ image buttons.
When are you going to NZ? Im leaving week after next too, for three weeks, might see you there.
Mmm, comments on that site should be working, just might take a while to get moderated — both my email accounts have been down in the last 48 hours! What the! The Internet is broken :’(
RE: the cat, whatever :P I make no claim to being a great illustrator, but some logo needed doing and the few people I know who do draw don’t do it on the computer (though to be fair I could have vectorised a scanned graphic, but that was too much of a pain at that point in time).
There are a few ways to do curved corners… but the way I’ve done it on that site is pretty uninspired, it’s just a part of the wide background image. If you need/want to do something more adventurous, there are a variety of techniques out there. ALA, as always, is an excellent resource, whilst Incutio has a nice roundup of the various techniques available. I could give you more links but those two will cover everything sufficently.
I’m going to NZ tomorrow, actually… should pack :/ I’ll be on the South island the whole time, mostly around Queenstown (hiking for a week), so if you’re in that part of the world… I might see you! Hehe, won’t have a working phone with me though! *dies of shock* ;-)
WOOSH!
g0t back from katoomba-ness?
YAY! cat-scan got live… *clear* *thunk* WOOOOHOOOOO! IT’S ALIVE!!!!!!!!!! (*evil laugh*)