Programming

I have been getting quite a collection of image files on my computer. (No, not from those types of sites.) The trouble is, I'm not really happy with the 'View as Web Page' option. The thumbnail option isn't much better.

So, I started to write some crude Foxpro programs that gather data from the directory and use it to make an HTML* file. This makes it a whole lot easier to look through the pictures.

Since many of them have dates embedded in the file name, I decided to write the program so that it will parse out the date, grab the suffix and prefix (the part of the file name before and after the date information), and either display that under the picture or use it to make multiple HTML files. All off the directories had different formats and I wanted them displayed differently, so each had a custom program.

After copying and customizing the same program time after time, I finally decided to pull them all together and write one master program that will do it all. I just set some flags (preferences) at the top of the program, run it, and I get the HTML files that I want.



* HTML means Hyper Text Markup Language. Web pages are written in HTML. It consists of regular text with tags that tell the web browser what to do with the text, how to format it, where to get the images, and other information. As I write this, I am writing HTML code by hand because I'm too lazy to bring up an HTML editor.