Tom's Life Bits

The steps to building a web page consist of the following:

1. Ordered List Item
2. White balance the camera.
3. Photograph plant and flower views of the violet..
4. Photograph the plant tag after taking pictures of the plant and flower. This is important for consistency - always take the plant tag picture after taking the flower and plant picture.
5. Attach the USB cable and use the download program to load all images into a directory.
6. In ImageDb under the subdirectory Imagedb/Violets/2003/ create a directory for todays date. Under this directory create a directory called Resize.
7. Move the originals into the date directory. Using the ACDC label command (Ctrl-D), label all the violet images with their violet name.
8. Select a good plant and a good flower picture. Crop and resize to a width of 640 and then “Save as” into the resize directory.
9. When all images have been resized, copy the descript.ion file into the resize directory.
10. Run DSC_clean against the description file in the resize directory. This removes all the entries from the description file of images that were not resized and subsequently copied into the resize directory.
11. Run the thumbnail program selecting a width of 150 and a text prefix of “_” (underscore) for the thumbnails.
12. Run MultiRename to make all image files lowercase.
13. Copy these images into subdirectory Fimages which is under the great violets program directory. On the development machine I use the VbProject directory as a program directory. Some of the other machines use Great Violets under the Program Files directory.
14. Run Great violets and individually enter each flower and plant picture for the violet name. Do not use the program to point to the filename beginning with an underscore. These are the thumbnails and should not be referenced - the program will automatically pick them up.

The publish button on Great Plants produces a list of violets that have been checkmarked in the EditRecords portion of the database. This listing includes a header and footer that are output into the html pages. To change the header or footer, edit the file named “@listfo.txt”. The file can contain html formatting info such as fonts, heading level, etc. The nonstandard tags “tghead” and “tgfoot” define delimiters for the heading and footing respectively. Edit everything between the tag “taghead” and “/taghead” for the header and between “tgfoot” and “/tgfoot” for the footer. Text anywhere else in the file will not be included in the heading and footing.

The violet pictures consist of 4 images for each plant. They are:

• Plant image 640 x 480
• Flower image 640 x 480
• Plant image thumb 150 x 113
• Flower image thumb 150 x 113

These images go into the fimages subdirectory. This is directly under MyDocuments\GreatData\Vcat\fimages. The GreatViolets program finds “MyDocuments” and accesses the jpg image files under it. Naming Convention

The file naming convention uses all lower case letters and has the following format:

• The plant image is the base flower name with “.jpg” as the file extension
• The flower image is the flowername above but ending with the letter f and then “.jpg” as the file extension.
• The plant and flower thumb is the same name as above but with an underscore (_) prepended (put at the beginning of the name)

Here is an example for the violet named “candy swirl”

• Plant file: canswr.jpg
• Flower file: canswrf.jpg
• Plant thumb: _canswr.jpg
• Flower thumb: _canswrf.jpg

The program is in the GreatViolets directory under \\TomsData\VBProjects on 'Manon'. Click on the VB project file (extension vbp) and the project will open in Visual Basic 6. Select Make greatviolets.exe under the file menu of the vb6 compiler