PennAve
[ project page ]
[ web CVS ]
[ demo ]
Welcome to the home page for PennAve, a dynamic photo gallery application
written in Python. It is designed to be used in conjunction with
F-Spot to organize and manage your
photos.
You're probably asking, what good is yet another photo gallery program?
Well, this one is a little different. It's designed to use technologies
that will form the basis for the semantic web. This means that all
output is done with XML and then translated to HTML with XSLT stylesheets.
If you didn't understand any of that, don't worry, it just means that the
underlying technology makes it really easy to extend PennAve. It also
means that you can completely change the look of your gallery without
modifying the code for PennAve itself - either choose to modify the style
sheet for small modifications, or the XSLT sheet for large scale
redesigns.
The project is still in a fairly new state as I only started writing it
after we got a digital camera. When releases are made they will be
available at the files
section on SourceForge. In addition if you visit our
project page on
SourceForge, you can find all sorts of other helpful stuff, like a bug
tracker and some mailing lists.
If you're impatient and want a brief idea of what it does, you can see
a bit of a live demo
with a bunch of pictures from my life on it.
Project Status
2007/05/23 - The long awaited version 0.4 of PennAve was released
today. Be sure to grab it from the project page.
2006/08/22 - I've added some new features to PennAve that wil be out
in the forthcoming 0.4 release. First, I've added support for the
Last-Modified header. This allows clients to cache images, eliminating the
need to send the images with every request. I've also added support for
the canvas tag for some graphical elements. You can seem them right now
at the demo site.
2006/08/11 - Version 0.3 of PennAve was released today! Download it
and enjoy the new features, such as RSS feeds, slideshows, and the cool new
customizable home page!
2006/07/24 - More sexy features are heading out for everyone. First,
I've added support for RSS feeds when browsing the tag views. These are
created dynamically for any combination of tags. Quite cool. Secondly, I
added a javascript/ajaxy slide show with fading characteristics. It seems
to work in all the browsers I've tested it on (FF 1.0, 1.5 and IE 6), however
there is a slight problem with FireFox 1.0 that causes a quick blink between
slides.
2006/07/14 - That's right, nearly two years after I first started
the project, I've revived it. What's better, is that the
demo site now shows
something interesting. Among the major changes with the current revision
of the software are the reliance on the database from
F-Spot for tagging and organizing your
photos and the use of CherryPy to allow
you to run PennAve without a web server. Check back soon for a new release.
Honest.
2004/08/03 - As a result of the wedding, I have many many pictures.
This has exposed a problem with PennAve relating to the size of directories.
Namely, it's basically a denial of service attack the first time you hit
the web page of a directory with 100+ images in it. Not to mention what
happens if multiple people hit it. To alleviate this, I'm moving up the
time frame for the prescaling code to hit. This doesn't mean that I'm
removing the auto-scaling stuff. That will still be present, I'm just
making it so you can prescale the images and then hit the cached version
without needing a call to the CGI. For this to work, the cache directory
must be somewhere in your web accessible tree. More docs about that later.
2004/07/29 - I'm back from my wedding and getting into the whole grad
school thing again. Hopefully more updates will come soon. I got some nifty
ideas while on the wedding. While I'm at it, for the longer range, if anyone
has an SVG world map can you email me? I'm particular interested in one where
each state/country is it's own path. Thanks.
2004/06/28 - I've been busy at academic conferences for the past
week and a half. On Friday I leave for the wedding and won't be back until
the end of July. No updates for a while.
2004/06/18 - Release 0.1 is out the door. Grab it from the files page.
2004/06/15 - Back from my trip to Texas. I'm almost ready for a
0.1 release. I'm just making the output from the program look a little
bit cleaner. I'm resisting the urge to over-optimize right now so things
are a bit slow.
2004/06/07 - I'm in the process of cleaning up objects and making
XML output more consistent. I leave for a trip on Wednesday and get back
the following Monday so no commits for a few days. Hopefully a 0.1 release
will follow shortly thereafter.
2004/06/05 - I think it's basically component complete in the
CVS archive right now. So, if you'd like to pull a copy from CVS, you
can tinker with it. See the
CVS page
for more information.
2004/06/05 - With all the problems I've had so far with SF, I'm
wondering why so many people use it. I'm half tempted to install a copy
of GForge and just use my own server on my cable modem. Anyway, lots
of fun changes, but I can't commit them because CVS is broken.
2004/06/04 - Apparently the debilitating bug on SourceForge has
been fixed so I've uploaded the CVS archive to the SF servers. Time
to get some real hacking going.
2004/06/02 - Project started on SourceForge. Unfortunately, I'm
currently being bit by the unable to commit bug for new projects, so I
can't put anything in CVS yet.
