[ANN] booh: static web-album generator

ruby-talk
1

Hi,

I'd like to announce the general availability of `booh', a static
web-album generator written in ruby and ruby-gtk2. Booh is a program
which takes one or several series of photos and videos, and
automatically builds static web pages to browse them, creating
thumbnails, etc.

I created booh because I wanted to use a web-album with all the
features I find important, and no existing web-album have them all
(for example, automatic rotation of portrait images, support for
videos, preloading, sub-albums, themability, a powerful GUI for
editing, etc).

Booh is splitted into a backend in pure ruby for all processing
(creating thumbnails and HTML pages), and a GUI in ruby-gtk2 for
edition (removing/rotating images, entering captions, etc). An XML
"configuration" file is used to communicate between them, and thus
external edition/automation is easy if needed.

As booh is approaching maturity, I felt this is the right moment to
announce it. On the website, you will be able to browse an example
web-album, and also download a demo movie I have created showing how
to create a simple album with the GUI.

http://zarb.org/~gc/html/booh.html

At present time, booh is available in english, french, and japanese
(thanks to Masao Mutoh). More translations welcome (uses
ruby-gettext).

Booh is currently distributed as sourcecode, gentoo ebuild, and
mandriva rpm. Contributed binary packages for more distributions
welcome. Booh is probably as Linux-oriented as I am, so I'm not sure
it would run on xp or macosx out of the box (I don't use these systems
myself so I don't care much).

Various disclaimers:

- web-albums produced by booh use a lot of javascript, so you can
forget your dillo and links (on the other hand, I think that
web-albums produced by booh shine in firefox/MSIE - they run ok with
konq but poor konq seems to have even worse JS support than MSIE, so
it's not optimal)
- booh's GUI is my first larger program with ruby-gtk2, so the
internals of the GUI might not look so bright
- there seems to be segfaults on x86_64 (on mandriva), I think they
probably come from ruby-gtk2 since there are none on i586, but I don't
have an x86_64 myself so I can't help much at this time :frowning:
- booh uses rexml which can be a bit slow but some xpath precomputing
is done to fight this (I didn't switch to ruby-libxml because rexml is
so featureful)

···

--
Guillaume Cottenceau - http://zarb.org/~gc/

2

[...]

And a perfect example of the demo effect: if you launch the GUI for
the first time, and create a new album right away, it will abort on a
bug because of missing config file. To circumvent this bug, you need
to quit the GUI at least once, so that the config file will be created
(~/.booh-gui-rc).

···

On 8/11/05, Guillaume Cottenceau <gcottenc@gmail.com> wrote:

Various disclaimers:

--
Guillaume Cottenceau - http://zarb.org/~gc/

3

Guillaume Cottenceau ha scritto:

Hi,

I'd like to announce the general availability of `booh', a static
web-album generator written in ruby and ruby-gtk2. Booh is a program
which takes one or several series of photos and videos, and
automatically builds static web pages to browse them, creating
thumbnails, etc.

<anip>
this seems nice, thanks for sharing.
BTW, may I suggest that you publish it on gnomefiles.org?
this way you may get even more feedback

4

Very nice, no grumbles with what you have done.

But,

Have you ever read Pratchette? He has a character who is a brilliant
inventor, the only down side is he is not very good at naming his
inventions. So he might come up with an item called 'Vertical-up-lifting-
device-with-bloody-huge-fan-blades'.

You and he seem to have something in common with 'Booh'.

···

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 18:18:40 +0900, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:

Hi,

I'd like to announce the general availability of `booh', a static
web-album generator written in ruby and ruby-gtk2. Booh is a program
which takes one or several series of photos and videos, and
automatically builds static web pages to browse them, creating
thumbnails, etc.

I created booh because I wanted to use a web-album with all the
features I find important, and no existing web-album have them all
(for example, automatic rotation of portrait images, support for
videos, preloading, sub-albums, themability, a powerful GUI for
editing, etc).

Booh is splitted into a backend in pure ruby for all processing
(creating thumbnails and HTML pages), and a GUI in ruby-gtk2 for
edition (removing/rotating images, entering captions, etc). An XML
"configuration" file is used to communicate between them, and thus
external edition/automation is easy if needed.

As booh is approaching maturity, I felt this is the right moment to
announce it. On the website, you will be able to browse an example
web-album, and also download a demo movie I have created showing how
to create a simple album with the GUI.

http://zarb.org/~gc/html/booh.html

At present time, booh is available in english, french, and japanese
(thanks to Masao Mutoh). More translations welcome (uses
ruby-gettext).

Booh is currently distributed as sourcecode, gentoo ebuild, and
mandriva rpm. Contributed binary packages for more distributions
welcome. Booh is probably as Linux-oriented as I am, so I'm not sure
it would run on xp or macosx out of the box (I don't use these systems
myself so I don't care much).

Various disclaimers:

- web-albums produced by booh use a lot of javascript, so you can
forget your dillo and links (on the other hand, I think that
web-albums produced by booh shine in firefox/MSIE - they run ok with
konq but poor konq seems to have even worse JS support than MSIE, so
it's not optimal)
- booh's GUI is my first larger program with ruby-gtk2, so the
internals of the GUI might not look so bright
- there seems to be segfaults on x86_64 (on mandriva), I think they
probably come from ruby-gtk2 since there are none on i586, but I don't
have an x86_64 myself so I can't help much at this time :frowning:
- booh uses rexml which can be a bit slow but some xpath precomputing
is done to fight this (I didn't switch to ruby-libxml because rexml is
so featureful)

5

Hi,

Hi,

I'd like to announce the general availability of `booh', a static
web-album generator written in ruby and ruby-gtk2. Booh is a program
which takes one or several series of photos and videos, and
automatically builds static web pages to browse them, creating
thumbnails, etc.

Great!

- booh's GUI is my first larger program with ruby-gtk2, so the
internals of the GUI might not look so bright
- there seems to be segfaults on x86_64 (on mandriva), I think they
probably come from ruby-gtk2 since there are none on i586, but I don't
have an x86_64 myself so I can't help much at this time :frowning:

Hmm...

OK, I'll try it.

Thanks for your great works.

···

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 18:18:40 +0900 Guillaume Cottenceau <gcottenc@gmail.com> wrote:

--
.:% Masao Mutoh<mutoh@highway.ne.jp>

6

Hi,

Have you ever read Pratchette? He has a character who is a brilliant
inventor, the only down side is he is not very good at naming his
inventions. So he might come up with an item called 'Vertical-up-lifting-
device-with-bloody-huge-fan-blades'.

You and he seem to have something in common with 'Booh'.

Yes, I've read some books from Terry Pratchett and I enjoyed them very
much. I think I may have been influenced by a project of a friend and
master:

Basically, if projects with such bad names do have a little success,
it will certainly be off their own quality :slight_smile:

···

--
Guillaume Cottenceau - http://zarb.org/~gc/