Friday, August 8, 2014

Whose Art is It Anyway

Mary Tyler Moore was someone who I knew only as one of many TV nitwits ... until I went to Broadway and saw her starring in a play entitled, "Whose Life is It Anyway?"  The focus was around end of life decisions and the power she brought to the role hooked me on theatre forever.  If you only think of Mary Tyler Moore as someone who does sitcoms, you haven't seen her at all.  She was extraordinary.

There's no argument over whose art is on Valerie's page but there's a question of the imposition of my own in what I do with languages.  It's my personal belief that art is universal but it can elicit some hostility if I were to translate the page to Arabic.  This isn't my point to make, tho.  Keeping any more languages in the background for now would be best although I think it would look so damn cool in Chinese!

Update:  since I started writing this I have tested what would happen if I did Arabic and Chinese.  Both would display just fine.  I will try with more browsers but it looks good so far.



On the systems front.  This is the stuff that's to prevent Valerie from needing a PhD in screwing with Unix file servers.  The object is to create the mechanism to let her get a graphic of one of her paintings online very quickly and with zero hassle.

(Hey, the stuff's going to be geeky for a while.  It'll pass.  The guitar calls as loud as it ever did.)


Prior to getting on with this the high-resolution picture of the painting will need to be shrunk down to the size best appropriate for the site.  That's a maximum of 600x700 pixels and a utility like GraphicConverter can do it easily as can iPhoto for free.  The format has to be .jpg or the uploader won't touch it.  With those dimensions, it doesn't matter if anyone steals it as a 300dpi printer would only create a four-inch image from it.


Assume the file that's been created is Monkey.jpg and she has already uploaded it.  After the upload completed, the page refreshed itself and looked as it does below.




Image File Uploader

Here she picks the file off her own disk drive using standard navigation dialogs to find it.
When she's satisfied she has the right one, click Upload and away it goes.


Image Mover

After the upload completes, this page is re-entered to re-build itself and look up anything in the special folder which now contains Monkey.jpg.  If yes, do you want to move it to the production Images file.  Be sure to click on the link first to verify it is a good upload.  If that's good, click Move and off it goes.  If the Monkey is not there, try again from the Upload step.

At this point, the image is already accessible to the slide show when people go through sequentially.  You will know if it is successful as Monkey.jpg will disappear from this screen.


Image Information Update

This page will again refresh itself and this time the Monkey.jpg reference will be gone as it isn't in the special folder anymore.

Fill in information about the Monkey and then click Update.  This will add the information to the image data file and this will make the Monkey appear on the list on the Portfolio page.



The big problem I see is what if she sees an error in the data record after she has submitted it.  I don't want her to have to go to CPanel to edit it so there has to be an editor on the site to do it instead.  This is a good puzzle and it will be preventing me from adding Swahili and Iceland's languages.  With that in-hand, it looks as close to air-tight as any Web site is going to get.

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