valibuk.net

Pictures from a trip to the UK in May 2010. We visited lovely places like the Lake District or Edinburgh.

A new version of Rhotoalbum, a simple but powerful photo album generator written in Ruby, has been released.

The version 0.8 contains a number of features (well, after two years) like RSS support (try with cooliris), options per album, pagination, cool thumbnail effects for photos and album covers and improved album cover managing.

(There is more where this came from … )

One of the most common ways how to control a command line application is to use options, e.g. almost every command line application would understand -h or --help or /? (common in the MS-DOS world) as a request to show some instruction.

Ruby (but also other programming languages such as Java) has a basic support for accessing command line arguments, so there is a space for libraries that make reading options easier such as Trollop, Optiflag or Choice.
Update: Actually not so true for Ruby – there are two standard libraries (they are built-in, so it is not necessary to install them): OptionParser and GetoptLong. Check them out. (thnx to Max)

The Choice library is an interesting choice, not only because it works smoothly, but it is a nice example of a domain specific language (DSL or see my older post about DSL in Ruby).

(There is more where this came from … )

Flickr is a well known site for sharing photos and it is one of the most popular sites that published their services and allow to use them freely.

It is not necessary to work on a photo uploader, photo printing site or a mashup solution to become an user of the services. Sometimes it is interesting enough to get a list of your photos URLs and show them in a favourite flash photo viewer on your own web site.

There are several libraries for Ruby, one of the most up-to-date is Flickraw. Unfortunately it is not mentioned on the official Flickr services page, although it works smoothly, has a good documentation and is actively maintained (btw. the RubyForge project page is outdated, but the github page is up-to-date).
(There is more where this came from … )

Pictures from a late autumn trip to Croatia and Slovenia in November 2009.