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PIXOLID.code

This site is generated by an open source comman line utility written by Al Bar. You can download the utility as an eclipse project by clicking here.

The PIXOLID crawler iterates down a given directory. It looks for images and designated property files, from which it generates PHP snippets that provide fields used by the top-level template index.php.

The crawler recognizes three start-up parameters: crawlPath [s] [m]

  • The crawlPath is the initial directory that the PIXOLID crawler inspects in search of images and property files.
  • The optional parameter "s" specifies that the crawler should not recurse beyond the initial crawl path.
  • The optional parameter "m" specifies that the crawler should only update metadata PHP snippets and not perform any image manipulation procedures.

The crawler can process metadata from the following files:

site.properties to site.php (1)

  • creator - The author or organization responsible for the site.
  • name - The name of site, used for SEO lables.
  • tagline - A brief summary of the site, for SEO.
  • header - The site's header. PIXOLID uses it to link back to Facebook.
  • license - The license applied to the images on this site.
  • footer - The site's footer. PIXOLID uses it to track site statistics.
  • dirName - The name of the current directory within the crawl hierarchy.

meta.properties to meta.php (2)

  • contents - A crawler generated PHP array of subdirectory information.
  • images - A crawler generated PHP array of image information.
  • keywords - Keywords describing a given section, used for the page's meta tag.
  • locate - Where the images where produced.
  • date - When the images where produced.
  • crumbs - A crawler generated crumb trail.
  • dirName - The name of the current directory within the crawl hierarchy.

info.txt (3): This file allows for arbitrary HTML to be inserted in the template file.

When the crawler finds images in a directory, it generates three image subdirectories (4):

  • lead - Contains a JPG version of the lead image for a given directory, as assigned by the filename.lead property in meta.properties
  • thumbs - Thumbnails for all the images in a given directory.
  • smalls - Smaller versions of all the images in a given directory.

As the crawler operates, it propagates the lead image (lead.jpg) from subdirectories to the initial crawl directory. (5)

The diagram below depicts the inner workings of the site:
 
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