Posted by Doug
Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:58:10 GMT
Jim Weirich was kind enough to let me hijack the storycards on Rubyforge. I knew he had started a storycards project and that he had basically abandonded it. Well, really he gave the project to John Wilgar who renamed it to eXPlainPMT. So, it’s official. Jim has given me the name “storycards” so there’s no confusion between his pre-alpha project and what I’m doing.
Also, if you’re interested I’ve setup darcs2rss to generate an rss feed of my project changes.
Posted in Programming, Storycards | no comments
Posted by Doug
Thu, 06 Oct 2005 03:36:51 GMT
I’ve started working on Storycards. I’ve looked at a bunch of solutions for project planning. None of what I’ve looked at really models how I like to work. 37Signals has several products that work very much like what I want. The problem is that none of them are exactly what I want. What’s more, to their prices for the version of basecamp that includes time tracking is simply too expensive for me. John Wilgar has written eXPlainPMT, an XP-based project management app. Even though John’s doing some great work, I think it’s just too heavy for me.
So, I’m going to roll my own. I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this. My plan is to keep it very simple. I hope to just pick off each of my “requirements” one by one as I can. I’m thinking maybe one requirement a week. We’ll see. Feel free to grab the code. Send me patches and I’ll be glad to look at them. Oh, yea. Of course, this is in Ruby on Rails. The link above has my project summary and goals.
Posted in Programming, Storycards, Ruby on Rails | 2 comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 05 Oct 2005 21:19:45 GMT
So I actually talked to Amanda in the Pro Gallery team about their C4P(Click for Prints) program. I was blissfully happy with my implementation but had a couple questions. As it turns out, they have good reason for discouraging people from using it.
First, there's no way to specify the cropping. My camera takes pictures with 2x3 aspect ratio. That means 8x10" photos print perfectly, but 4x6" and 5x7" require cropping. That means all non 2x3 pictures go through some type of auto-cropping. Second, all pictures go through Shutterfly's proprietary image correction for color, contrast, exposure, sharpening, etc. You can turn this off if you like to manage your own color. The C4P doesn't allow you to turn it off though. So that's why I don't like the C4P interface.
As it turns out, the C4P interface lives entirely outside Shutterfly's internal tracking system. Prints come in and work their way through their system; but there's no way to track them during or after the order is completed. So, they aren't accepting any new accounts. For my implementation, I used the account setup for the php "Gallery":http://gallery.menalto.com/. So, it works; but only sort of.
The good news is that Shutterfly fully recognizes the market for photographers who want to host their own galleries but use someone else for back-end fulfillment. They are working on a complete solution that includes full control of how the prints are done and allowing for custom pricing. Amanda said it would be ready sometime in 2006. My guess is this service won't be cheap. Their current Pro accounts are several hundred dollars a year. Not very nice for us amateurs.
Technorati Tags: photo gallery
Posted in Programming, Internet, Photography | 2 comments
