IDS (Image Display System) Hacks

Last modified: Tuesday, 07-Nov-2006 19:02:12 CST

Column Width

Summary

I’ve been a big fan of IDS, a photo album system written in Perl, for several years now. It’s one of the first things that gets installed when I periodically blow away and rebuild my Linux box, a higher priority than even getting X tweaked “just so.”

One thing I had noticed, though, was that the display of items on the homepage was inconsistent with the way album items were displayed on individual album pages. The album pages would arrange their items in columns 133 pixels wide, making them nice but entirely too rigid, while the homepage would just wing it and let the columns come out however seemed appropriate to the browser, which means that a long album name could skew the column widths in a way that looks downright incorrect. Certainly, not the beautiful behavior that I’d like to see, and definitely not consistent.

To solve this, I’ve added some tweaks to IDS to allow the administrator to customize the column widths, both on the homepage and the album pages. The column width on the homepage and the album pages can be set independently; you now have the option of specifying the number of pixels for the column, or specifying that it should be “balanced,” meaning that the column widths will be dynamically determined as percentages based on the number of columns that have been specified.

The difference is somewhat subtle, but now it doesn’t bug me by looking weird.

I’ve submitted my patch below to the project maintainers; hopefully it’s worthy of inclusion in a future release. In the mean time, feel free to download and play with it.

Downloads

Get IDS (current version is 0.82)

Get ids-columnwidth.patch.tar.gz [tar.gz, 1.9KB] (my diffs against IDS 0.82)

Related

Installing & Configuring IDS on Gentoo

IDS homepage