I've been using Sitelen Mute for a while to generate the picture galleries on this site. It is available from CPAN.
Sitelen Mute originally grew out of fgallery. It's a Perl script that generates a static site which uses Javascript for navigation. It processes the images, generates previews, generates blurry backgrounds, puts them all in a folder, places the Javascript files there (for navigation), and so on.
As a user, however, I noticed that all I ever did was scroll through the gallery. I didn't need the small previews; I didn't need the large album zip files it generated. So now I'm thinking that perhaps all of this can be handled by the wiki. Just make uploading images comfortable and stick the things I have on wiki pages. I did this for two recent small galleries: Along the Aare from Büren to Solothurn and Hiking up the Gemmi. It worked fine! All I needed to ensure was that all the images are marked as "lazy loading" – the browser should only load the images as they're scrolled into view so that opening a page with dozens of images that visitors then don't look at don't eat too much bandwidth.
Along the Aare from Büren to Solothurn
Yesterday I started thinking about doing it for the Sitelen Mute galleries. Converting them to wiki pages should be straight forward. And so I did it. If you find yourself in a similar situation, take a look at the Perl script. I noticed that some of those galleries have missing titles and descriptions but I fear those were already missing in the original galleries generated by Sitelen Mute.
You can still find all the pictures, but now the wiki serves them. The only issue is that my rate limiting via fail2ban is still in place and the regular Oddmu URLs are not exempt like the old gallery URLs were. Which means you're limited to loading 40 URLs in 20 seconds or you'll get blocked by the firewall. Scroll slowly and appreciate the images, I guess. I'll try and make an exception for images. 😄
This probably means the end of Sitelen Mute. It's not going to get deleted, but I also don't see myself tackling any major rewrites or improvements.
#Pictures #Sitelen Mute #Oddµ