We have images stored in a file system in the following format. So that web applications can have access to those images with url (http://imageserver.domain.com/items/it1/small.jpg) through an http server.
Now, to allow graphics team to have access to those images for
adding/updating, I was thinking to setup an SVN rep for the folder
“items”. Is this considered a best practice? Any suggestions?
Its certainly doable, however I'd advise that you have 2 folders: one containing a "working set" of images to be used by your web app, and another to be accessed by your graphics team whenever necessary. That way, your team can have a stock of images to work with, while avoiding any possibilities of broken image links or other problems inside your web app.
Better to play it safe IMO.
Hope this helps!
I've always heard that it's considered 'good practice' to have only text under source control. With that said, I've seen companies certainly put images in their repository. Others have created round-abouts like having a virtual directory in IIS point to a shared file server. I prefer the latter since it doesn't take so long to bring down branches. On the reverse side, it provides no historical data that SC would--if needed, of course.
I was thinking to setup an SVN rep for the folder “items”. Is this considered a best practice?
It's an acceptable practice. The images are small and not all that likely to change.
Any suggestions?
Write a cheat sheet for your graphic artists so that they can check out and commit images without problems. The cheat sheets would be specific to the graphic tools they use and their access to Subversion.
Related
So, I need to make a file storage for our team. Also I have SVN server. Opportunity to do rollbacks and control on who created or deleted file is very neccessary and important for our project.
Any ideas? Maybe without SVN. I can connect using WebDAV but only in read-only mode (because there is no LOCKS support in it).
You can set up the SVN server to allow exactly that.
Read the chapter in the SVN book about WebDAV and Autoversioning
So, what you want is the ability to roll back changes, and limit who can make the changes, but without the bother of checking in and out files?
Maybe Subversion isn't for you. I've done similar sharing with Dropbox and there's now BoxNet that's suppose to be like Dropbox on Steroids. Dropbox (and I assume box.net too) has some features that are very nice:
You can setup folder sharing between particular teams. That way, you can say who can and cannot access these files.
Dropbox automatically saves each and every version of a file, so you can always go back to previous versions -- even if that file has been deleted.
Files are stored locally. All a user has to know is to save a particular file in a particular folder, and everyone has access to it. I've successfully used Dropbox to collaborate with managers that make the Pointed Hair boss in Dilbert look like a high tech genius.
There's also Skydrive and Google Drive, but I don't find them as universal as Dropbox or as easy to use. It's possible to use Dropbox without ever going to the Dropbox website. To the non-geek, it appears to be magic as files I've written and edited appear on their drive. It took me a few weeks to train one person that he didn't have to email me his document when he made changes because I already had it.
Dropbox gives you 2 Gb of space for free which doesn't sound like a lot. However, my first hard drive was a whopping 20Mb which was twice the size of the standard 10Mb drive at that time. If you're not storing a lot of multimedia presentations or doing a lot of Photoshop, 2Gb might be more than enough for your project.
I know Windows 7 and later has some sort of versioning system built into it. I know this because anytime someone mentions that Mac OS X has time machine, some Wingeek pipes in stating that Windows has the same thing, but only better!. Unfortunately, Windows is not my forte, so I don't know too much about this specific feature. I believe the default is once per day, but it can be changed. This might be the perfect solution if everyone is on Windows.
Subversion can do autoversioning as Stefan stated. Considering his position in the Subversion community (especially his work on TortoiseSVN), he knows his stuff. Unfortunately I don't know too much about it since I've never used or seen this feature implemented. It's probably due to the fact that I work mainly with developers who know what a version control system is, and therefore have no need for something that does the versioning for them.
Also don't forget to check if you can use your corporate Sharepoint which does something very much what you want. I am not too impressed with Sharepoint, but if the facility is there, and your company can give you the support, it is something you probably want to look into.
I am looking for free web image management system/script/...
I was using and still use photobucket service, but my account is free and has limited space and bandwidth. Now I am approaching the limits. On another side I have web hosting account and want to use it for image hosting instead or in addition to my photobucket. Sounds good. I can use ftp to upload my images and I am fine with it. What I miss is photobucket's web interface to my images. I am talking about photo galleries or portfolio like or something. But basic list of thumbnails, so I can see my images and easy get link to specific image in different formats to past into forum posts or into other web pages referring to that specific picture. Besides, I need easy way to organize pictures in albums/subalbums (like in file system). I see gazillion of image gallery systems, but have hard time to find for what I need. Oh, and I do not want database, just flatfiles/directories.
Anything come to mind?
There's Coppermine Gallery.
I was just looking for something similar.
I know Coppermine pretty well (I run a site powered by it): it is very flexible, with tons of options, and relatively easy to mod to your needs if you know a bit of php. It also reads and displays EXIF data if you configure it to do so. There is a lively community of developers for Coppermine. There is also a plugin that displays BBcode (http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php/topic,74043.msg356623.html#msg356623), unfortunately only image by image (not in bulk like the ImageShack Uploader). The drawback is that Coppermine is a pretty bulky script and does not perform super fast, especially on slow servers.
Bravenet seems to be a service more than a script.
I'm also checking out Lightbox 2 (http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/#example) which seems nice and tiny, but not a chance of getting the EXIF file into the displayed image or getting the BBcode.
Will keep an eye on this thread
Is there s a way for anti theft images? I'm not referring to web sites, what I want is if a JPEG is stolen it cannot be manipulated by the thief, only can be used by the owner.
This is not possible as jpeg doesn't have a mean to employ digital rights management. You could protect the file itself, but once somebody else has that file, he can do with it as he likes.
If you host an image on a website then you're stuck with the possibility that someone can download and save it, duplicate it and distribute it.
Some sites use watermarks to mark sample images and then know who they sell the full size images to. This might allow them some legal recourse if the image starts getting distributed.
In practice though this is almost impossible to protect against.
Hope that helps!
Even if you could come up with a protection scheme on the file itself, if the user can display it they only have to hit print screen to get a copy of the file they can work with. Unless you control the computer used to view the file completely it's not possible.
There's not really any good ways of preventing "theft" or free redistribution of content which you post freely on an accessible web-server.
I've been looking at the DropBox Mac client and I'm currently researching implementing a similar interface for a different service.
How exactly do they interface with finder like this? I highly doubt these objects represented in the folder are actual documents downloaded on every load? They must dynamically download as they are needed. So how can you display these items in finder without having actual file system objects?
Does anyone know how this is achieved in Mac OS X?
Or any pointer's to Apple API's or other open source projects that have a similar integration with finder?
Dropbox is not powered by either MacFUSE or WebDAV, although those might be perfectly fine solutions for what you're trying to accomplish.
If it were powered by those things, it wouldn't work when you weren't connected, as both of those rely on the server to store the actual information and Dropbox does not. If I quit Dropbox (done via the menu item) and disconnect from the net, I can still use the files. That's because the files are actually stored here on my hard drive.
It also means that the files don't need to be "downloaded on every load," since they are actually stored on my machine here. Instead, only the deltas are sent over the wire, and the Dropbox application (running in the background) patches the files appropriately. Going the other way, the Dropbox application watches for the files in the Dropbox folder, and when they change, it sends the appropriate deltas to the server, which propagates them to any other clients.
This setup has some decided advantages: it works when offline, it is an order of magnitude faster, and it is transparent to other apps, since they just see files on the disk. However, I have no idea how it deals with merge conflicts (which could easily arise with one or more clients offline), which are not an issue if the server is the only copy and every edit changes that central copy.
Where Dropbox really shines is that they have an additional trick that badges the items in the Dropbox folder with their current sync status. But that's not what you're asking about here.
As far as the question at hand, you should definitely look into MacFUSE and WebDAV, which might be perfect solutions to your problem. But the Dropbox way of doing things, with a background application changing actual files on the disk, might be a better tradeoff.
Dropbox is likely using FSEvents to watch for changes to the file system. It's a great API and can even bundle up changes that happened while your app was not running. It's the same API that Spotlight uses. The menubar app likely does the actual observing itself (since restarting it can fix uploads being hung, for instance).
There's no way they're using MacFUSE, as that would require installing the MacFUSE kernel extension to make Dropbox work, and since I definitely didn't install it, I highly doubt they're using it.
Two suggestions:
MacFUSE
WebDAV
The former will allow you to write an app that appears as a filesystem and does all the right things; the latter will allow you move everything server-side and let the user just mount your service as a file share.
Dropbox on the client is written in python.
The client seems to use a sqlite3 database to index files.
I suppose Dropobox split a file in chunks, to reduce bandwith usage.
By the way, it two people has the same file, even if they do not know each other, the server can optimize and avoid to transfer the file more times, only copying it on the server side
To me it feels like a heavily modified revision control system. It has all the features: updates files based on deltas, options to recover or restore old revisions of files. It almost feels like they are using git (GitFS?), or some filesystem they designed.
You could also give File Conveyor a try. It's a Python daemon capable of instantly detecting FS changes (on Linux through inotify, on OS X through FSEvents), processing the files and syncing them to one or more destinations.
Supported protocols: FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 (CloudFront is also supported), Rackspace Cloud Files. Can easily be extended. Uses django-storages.
"processing files": e.g. optimizing images, transcoding videos — this was originally conceived to be used for sending static assets to a CDN in the context of speeding up websites)
Back in the old days, Help was not trivial but possible: generate some funky .rtf file with special tags, run it through a compiler, and you got a WinHelp file (.hlp) that actually works really well.
Then, Microsoft decided that WinHelp was not hip and cool anymore and switched to CHM, up to the point they actually axed WinHelp from Vista.
Now, CHM maybe nice, but everyone that tried to open a .chm file on the Network will know the nice "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" screen that is caused by security restrictions.
While there are ways to make CHM work off the network, this is hardly a good choice, because when a user presses the Help Button he wants help and not have to make some funky settings.
Bottom Line: I find CHM absolutely unusable. But with WinHelp not being an option anymore either, I wonder what the alternatives are, especially when it comes to integrate with my Application (i.e. for WinHelp and CHM there are functions that allow you to directly jump to a topic)?
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader (or one of the more lightweight ones that not many people use). I could live with that seeing as this is kind of standard nowadays, but can you tell it reliably to jump to a given page/anchor?
HTML files seem to be the best choice, you then just have to deal with different browsers (CSS and stuff).
Edit: I am looking to create my own Help Files. As I am a fan of the "No Setup, Just Extract and Run" Philosophy, i had that problem many times in the past because many of my users will run it off the network, which causes exactly this problem.
So i am looking for a more robust and future-proof way to provide help to my users without having to code a different help system for each application i make.
CHM is a really nice format, but that Security Stuff makes it unusable, as a Help system is supposed to provide help to the user, not to generate even more problems.
HTML would be the next best choice, ONLY IF you would serve them from a public web server. If you tried to bundle it with your app, all the files (and images (and stylesheets (and ...) ) ) would make CHM look like a gift from gods.
That said, when actually bundled in the installation package, (instead of being served over the network), I found the CHM files to work nicely.
OTOH, another pitfall about CHM files: Even if you try to open a CHM file on a local disk, you may bump into the security block if you initially downloaded it from somewhere, because the file could be marked as "came from external source" when it was obtained.
I don't like the html option, and actually moved from plain HTML to CHM by compressing and indexing them. Even use them on a handful of non-Windows customers even.
It simply solved the constant little breakage of people putting it on the network (nesting depth limited, strange locking effects), antivirus that died in directories with 30000 html files, and 20 minutes decompression time while installing on an older system, browser safety zones and features, miscalculations of needed space in the installer etc.
And then I don't even include the people that start "correcting" them, 3rd party product with faulty "integration" attempts etc, complaints about slowliness (browser start-up)
We all had waited years for the problems to go away as OSes and hardware improved, but the problems kept recurring in a bedazzling number of varieties and enough was enough. We found chmlib, and decided we could forever use something based on this as escape with a simple external reader, if the OS provided ones stopped working and switched.
Meanwhile we also have an own compiler, so we are MS free future-proof. That doesn't mean we never will change (solutions with local web-servers seem favourite nowadays), but at least we have a choice.
Our software is both distributed locally to the clients and served from a network share. We opted for generating both a CHM file and a set of HTML files for serving from the network. Users starting the program locally use the CHM file, and users getting their program served from a network share has to use the HTML files.
We use Help and Manual and can thus easily produce both types of output from the same source project. The HTML files also contain searching capabilities and doesn't require a web server, so though it isn't an optimal solution, works fine.
So far all the single-file types for Windows seems broken in one way or another:
WinHelp - obsoleted
HtmlHelp (CHM) - obsoleted on Vista, doesn't work from network share, other than that works really nice
Microsoft Help 2 (HXS) - this seems to work right up until the point when it doesn't, corrupted indexes or similar, this is used by Visual Studio 2005 and above, as an example
If you don't want to use an installer and you don't want the user to perform any extra steps to allow CHM files over the network, why not fall back to WinHelp? Vista does not include WinHlp32.exe out of the box, but it is freely available as a download for both Vista and Server 2008.
It depends on how import the online documentation is to your product, a good documentation infrastructure can be complex to establish but once done it pays off. Here is how we do it -
Help source DITA compilant XML, stored in SCC (ClearCase).
Help editing XMetal
Help compilation, customized Open DITA Toolkit, with custom Perl/Java preprocessing
Help source cross references applications resources at compile time, .RC files etc
Help deliverables from single source, PDF, CHM, Eclipse Help, HTML.
Single source repository produces help for multiple products 10+ with thousands of shared topics.
From what you describe I would look at Eclipse Help, its not simple to integrate into .NET or MFC applications, you basically have to do the help mapping to resolve the request to a URL then fire the URL to Eclipse Help wrapper or a browser.
Is the question how to generate your own help files, or what is the best help file format?
Personally, I find CHM to be excellent. One of the first things I do when setting up a machine is to download the PHP Manual in CHM format (http://www.php.net/download-docs.php) and add a hotkey to it in Crimson Editor. So when I press F1 it loads the CHM and performs a search for the word my cursor is on (great for quick function reference).
If you are doing "just extract and run", you are going to run in security issues. This is especially true if you are users are running Vista (or later). is there a reason why you wanted to avoid packaging your applications inside an installer? Using an installer would alleviate the "external source" problem. You would be able to use .chm files without any problems.
We use InstallAware to create our install packages. It's not cheap, but is very good. If cost is your concern, WIX is open source and pretty robust. WIX does have a learning curve, but it's easy to work with.
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader
I use Foxit Reader on Windows at home and at work. A lot smaller and very quick to open. Very handy when you are wondering what exactly a80000326.pdf is and why it is clogging up your documents folder.
I think the solution we're going to end up going with for our application is hosting the help files ourselves. This gives us immediate access to the files and the ability to keep them up to date.
What I plan is to have the content loaded into a huge series of XML files, each one containing help for a specific item. This XML would contain links to other XML files. We would use XSLT to display the contents as necessary.
Depending on the licensing, we may build a client-specific XSLT file in order to tailor the look and feel to what they need. We may need to be able to only show help for particular versions of our product as well and that can be done by filtering out stuff in the XSLT.
I use a commercial package called AuthorIT that can generate a number of different formats, such as chm, html, pdf, word, windows help, xml, xhtml, and some others I have never heard of (does dita ring a bell?).
It is a content management system oriented towards the needs of technical documentation writers.
The advantage is that you can use and re-use the same content to build a set of guides, and then generate them in different formats.
So the bottom line relative to the question of choosing chm or html or whatever is that if you are using this you are not locked into a given format, but you can provide several among which the user can choose, and you can even add more formats as you go along, at no extra cost.
If you just have one guide to create it won't be worth your while, but if you have a documentation set to manage then it is the best to my knowledge. Their support is very helpful also.