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April 15, 2005
photo.case.edu
well, i think i have a summer project idea in mind. let me know what you think of it...if it's worthwhile, suggestions and tips welcome!
Here's the pitch!
Photo.case.edu is a gallery that allows CWRU students and faculty to upload digital photos to personal and public photo albums. Personal photo albums allow CWRU students and faculty to store and view their digital photos. In addition, personal photos can be set to be viewable by all or select CWRU users.
A collection of moderated public photo albums are available for events, topics, and interests and can be viewed by anyone on the internet.
The main page would present random public photos and ways of navigating to personal and group albums. An optional downloadable screensaver for Linux, Mac, and Windows clients would connect to photo.case.edu and display a random public photo images.
Now the tech...in no particular order!
The server would feature the Apache webserver, Linux, PHP, and MySQL. Due to the large body of possible users (including alumni...) the server would need to have a large amount of space (2 terabytes of SCSI raid-5, and upgradable). The authentication would happen against the LDAP. First time users would register, resulting in the creation of their initial gallery. Student groups wishing to create a gallery would be assigned virtual accounts to the secretary of the student group. (much much more on this later!)
The gallery itself is going to be designed around and with the PHP-Gallery 2
http://gallery.sourceforge.net/
I *really* want to do this screensaver idea. Use some OpenGL and make it very pretty (flip and rotate pictures like a Mac does...). One of the features of this photo.case.edu is going to be a "Poster Upload Album". CWRU people can upload their fliers to this moderated album to announce events happening around or near campus. These images will be feature frequently on the screensaver (1 poster per every 10 pictures?), free of charge. It's like postering around campus without all the pain, waste of paper (i'm sure Wade and fribley will be happy) -- plus more effective since your ad is in the student's room!
Now the question?
Where am I going to get the money for this beast of a server? Not sure. But I plan on designing it first on my little box and then giving the project to the university if it works. We'll see.
Posted by bec at April 15, 2005 02:18 PM
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Comments
apparently photo.case.edu is "reserved"
eh, i think of something
Posted by: Ben at April 15, 2005 03:34 PM
So, a school-only version of webshots or Flickr or scrapbook? Why reinvent the wheel, especially since Flickr's basic service is still free? (I assume webshots is free too, but I've never used it to host my own photos.)
I really, really like the idea of the dedicated folder for campus event posters, and the ability to turn that folder into a screen saver. However, I think that could be implemented using tags and a community forum on Flickr really easily. Of course, most undergrads who use facebook seem to use webshots, rather than Flickr, but if you get to the freshmen and set a new fashion trend, it won't take long to reach the tipping point of culture change and make using Flickr the next hot thing.
What I would love is a campus version of Spamcop. I used the campus spam filter for three or four months, but it missed a lot of incoming spam each day. Spamcop does much, much better, but it's not free, so figuring out how to do something like what they do for everyone on campus would be a real benefit.
Or, another idea would be to create a campus server where students could post their papers, either accessible to the public, to all their peers in a class, or just to the professor and TA, and then professors could electronically write comments online. This has a lot of the same challenges as the photo.case.edu but involves work stuff rather than fun stuff... and it would have the dual benefits of cutting down on papers that get printed out in order to be submitted, and on the transmission of viruses when files are sent as attachments through email. (I know that we can already have students put papers in the digital dropbox on Blackboard, but it has no virus protection. I'd much rather have something that allowed me to mark up a PDF file, rather than using Microsoft Word and the track changes command.)
Posted by: Sandy at April 23, 2005 05:33 AM