mirror of
https://github.com/wezm/wezm.net.git
synced 2024-09-20 13:38:27 +00:00
48 lines
2.1 KiB
HTML
48 lines
2.1 KiB
HTML
Ever since this version of my site went live I've been meaning to post about
|
|
the generation of the monochrome thumbnails on the [front page](/). When I was
|
|
building the site I wanted to include recent items from my Flickr photostream
|
|
but didn't like the look of all the colour on a otherwise mostly monochrome
|
|
page.
|
|
|
|
The first thing I investigated was Javascript image processing libraries. The
|
|
only main contender in that space was [xxx]. It worked but its cross browser
|
|
support wasn't great at the time. So I moved on to writing a tool that I
|
|
could run locally.
|
|
|
|
[xxx]:
|
|
|
|
I decided the tool should generate a single image with
|
|
both the colour and monochrome versions in it (a technique known as spriting).
|
|
Using a single image means only one HTTP request instead of forty. Being a
|
|
programmer with an interest in Cocoa programming I created a small command line
|
|
tool that used the Flickr API to get the details of the last twenty images in
|
|
my photostream, fetch them and then use Core Image to convert them to
|
|
monochrome, add both the colour and monochrome versions to the output image and
|
|
save the result.
|
|
|
|
This worked great, however when I stopped hosting my site on my Mac I thought I
|
|
would need to run the process periodically on my Linux server, which ruled out
|
|
Core Image. I took this as another opportunity to learn something new and
|
|
rewrote it in Lua using imlib2 bindings. I had to make some additions to the
|
|
imlib bindings, which are [published on GitHub][luaimlib].
|
|
|
|
[luaimlib]:
|
|
|
|
I used the Lua version for some
|
|
time but never bothered to set it up on the server since I wasn't uploading
|
|
photos all that frequently and it was simple enough to run locally and rsync
|
|
the result. I've recently switched back to the Mac version as it was simpler to
|
|
get up and running on my new laptop.
|
|
|
|
The [code is on GitHub][code] if anyone wants to do something similar. The
|
|
Cocoa version is on the master branch, the Lua version is on the
|
|
[lua branch].
|
|
|
|
[code]: https://
|
|
[lua-branch]:
|
|
|
|
The current version of the processed thumbnails is shown below.
|
|
|
|
<div style="overflow-x: auto;">
|
|
<img src="/images/photos.jpg" />
|
|
</div>
|