Helpful Coder

I thought this was a moderately clever solution to a problem, so I thought I'd share it here. A client wanted to add thumbnails for every entry on their huge movable-type powered blog site. They already had full-size pics for most posts, they just wanted a preview thumbnail version associated with each post for use in the xml feed, search results, etc. This is a static movable type powered site with thousands of entries. The standard solution would be to create a new field using RightFields and store the filename of an image their, and then somehow go through all those thousands of entries and create thumbnails, then save the thumb filename in the new field. And do a full rebuild of the site. This would work, but it was going to take forever ! The first thing to figure out was how to automatically create those thumbs. I knew that the first image in each post was the one to use, so it was pretty easy to set up a little php script that would find that image tag in the entry body, and...

Had to update a site today to allow its automated thumbnail creation to pad out the thumbnail with a background color, so that all the thumbs were the same size. Took a little digging to find this helpful page . The first example, using extent 100x100 worked well enough on the command line, but oddly enough wouldn't worked when called from PHP. So I used the second method that crops the image, and that worked fine. Also, I had some good feedback on the VI automation post, and actually had a pretty long post with more examples/tips - but blogger got buggered up by some of the HTML used in the example, and I abandoned the post out of annoyance. Seriously, I sort of assumed blogger stripped tags out by converting ">" to ">", etc - apparently not. Oh well, I'll do it again at some point when i get a chance.