Jeremy Hinegardner

Okay, so I did it again! This time I actually wrote an application. I’m not quite pleased with it, but I think its a good starting point for future web-based image management applications.

My eventual goal is to have a webapp for use by artists, photographers, craftsman or anyone that wants their images to be displayed proudly online. The app will automatically alter the page the image is being displayed upon based upon the content of the image. Starting with the colorscheme but later on possibly layout and such base upon various image attributes.

I didn’t start out to exactly write an application, but to write some sort of generator for rails applications. I wanted to give an Open Search interface to any rails application that was backed by a simple search engine.

And I actually did it. The end result is:

• an indexing script that runs through all the Models looking for those that are descended from ActiveRecord’s and indexing the contents of those fields.
• a simple_search controller to handle the request (with Routes)
• set of html based rendering templates
• set of Open Search RSS result rendering templates

I don’t have any application online to show how it is working, but I’ll try and get some sort of packaging and how-to written up and posted to the ruby on rails mailling list.

Well, I’ve been working on my rails app for about 4 hours or so now. The core concepts that I wanted to get done are done, now its time to link them all together.

I’m blogging my progress on http://www.hinegardner.org if anyone would like to follow along.