Content Management for the Family
Being a hardcore geek, I have a tendency to do things for myself rather than to trust an ISP (Internet Service Provider). This habit started years ago when I had cablemodem service with AT&T@Home. The reliability of the email through them was so poor that I was forced to set up a mail server in violation of the Accepted Use Policy (AUP). Additional problems with AT&T caused me to switch to a DSL provider. My desire to do things myself has continued. I don’t use their home pages stuff because I don’t like the limitations included. My server (sitting in my closet) runs Apache for web pages. Apache is three times more popular than all other web server programs combined (take that Microsoft!).
The downside to doing everything yourself is the need to have content management capabilities that allow family members to maintain their personal web pages. For blogging, Movable Type is an excellent package. For web pages, nothing special needs to be done. Each family member has a directory on the server they access just like any other drive which is linked to Apache. The only thing I need to do is point a link to their personal stuff.
For pictures and drawings, however, the right tool took a little longer to find. In the past, I had used a program that required me to run a script on the server that generated a large number of static web pages. Once these pages had been customized, however, running the script again was a bad idea as it would overwrite the changes. This meant any new pictures had to be manually added by me. I hate doing things that the computer should be able to do.
Last week I found ThumbNails. It’s badly named (too generic) and has rough edges that could easily be fixed in a new version, and was a slight pain to initially set up (I’ve seen worse, though), but now that it’s installed it is damn close to being as self-sufficient that I could hope for.
I simply set up a directory that the program monitors via a daemon and my wife drops in pictures and drawings that she wishes to be on her web page. The directory is made available to my wife via Samba. When the daemon sees new content it automatically regenerates the web pages. It ties into a MySQL database so she can add captions and descriptions via a web based GUI.
