Alright, the previous part shows you the script that allows to randomly display a banner image. Now, this would quickly end up being a bit messy to manage, if you want to add a new banner, then update the page with the list of all panoramas.

I wrote a Ruby script to semi-automate the process. The source can be found on github.

We first start with a database of images, called images.db. It is a YAML file, with this format:

- url:   https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/.../s{}/xx.jpg
  width:  800
  repeat: true
  offset: -30
  text:   Krabi - Thailand
  date:   2012.12

I like to use YAML, because it is easy to parse in Ruby, without being as wordy as XML, but more structured than a simple text file.

The fields are:

  • url: source image location. s{} in the URL will be replaced by the proper image width
  • width: width to display
  • repeat: if the panorama is a full 360° that can be repeated
  • offset: vertical offset to center the image
  • text: Text that will appear in the banner, and in the image description
  • date: year and month when the image was taken

Then, the script banner.rb reads images.db. It generates the Javascript arrays, and insert them in jscode.template, creating a new jscode.js file, that you can then copy-paste on the blog.

It will also read pagecode.html.template, and generate pagecode.html for the list of images.

That’s it! Looking at the code should be somehow self-documenting, if you want to modify it. I release the code in public domain, feel free to use it.

Imported from “Random ideas of a drinking cat” blog.