Comic Genesis Forums

Just wondering how my fellow PHP-deprived Genners have handled galleries for their fanart and extra non-comic art.

Personally I've had to make all my thumbnails and cough up all the code manually, but I'm looking for a better solution. Ideally I'd love to be able to use something like Gallery, but it and all the similar scripts I've found use PHP.

Solutions I've found mentioned in the forum so far include hosting your gallery on a separate website you own (all I have is my CG site,) using external image-hosting services (I'd rather keep it all on my site,) and using Photoshop or other image-editing software to create your gallery (again, uses PHP, so you can only do it on a separate website.)

(Admins, feel free to move this if it's not in the appropriate place.)

I don't like using my photobucket account as an image gallery, and I can't stand DA, so I go the thumbnail method. Since I use dreamweaver, the code part is quite simple, so I don't mind actually plugging in the <a href=...>s, and I keep my FTP organized by page, not file type, so I don't have to go around finding where I put thumbnails and images. This is my set-up:

http://warofwinds.com/p/kezart.html

I've never really worked with PHP outside of "put this code here," so i can't say I've liked it enough to feel deprved of it. Then again, my comic isn't on comicgen anymore, so should I ever learn how to use PHP, I could implement it.

hehe, between a combination of laziness/not much art or fanart I have a very decriepit art page. I should get around to fixing that.

I did this.

Yeah...not exactly a triumph of web design or anything.

I use a file called imagetemplate.html that uses simple javascript to generate a page to display any image I want. It was created by Yarpsdat and modified by me to fit the theme of my site. I do my thumbnails in photoshop because I have a particular way I like to make them, but all the thumbnails link to a single HTML page, only with a picture set up to change.

The page is here: http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/viewimage.html

Basicly how this works is I just put http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/view ... gename.gif and it takes whatever is after the ? as the filename to look for and display. You can also link to pictures in a specific folder by using 'viewimage.html?folder/image.gif'. It keeps me from having to make a ton of pages to display my art since I can't link to pictures directly through CG.

The actual script is this:
Here is an few examples of it in action:

http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/view ... m/hugs.jpg
http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/view ... m/boom.jpg
http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/view ... t/col4.png



Images are work safe.

KittyKatBlack wrote:Here is an few examples of it in action:

http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/view ... m/hugs.jpg
http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/view ... m/boom.jpg
http://gbdstudios.comicgenesis.com/view ... t/col4.png



Images are work safe.

And they're the only images fitting that description in the whole site

Right now, everything I do is just with html, but in the future, I would probably use Javascript for everything. I'm going to code something now for fun, and then probably edit this and get back to you.

Edit: Here's what I would do: http://jarcuum.comicgenesis.com/javascript_images/

Relevent files are update.js and index.html

It is pretty much the same idea as KKB's, but it generates the list of images as well as the individual image pages.

So if you want to add an image you would put the image and it's thumbnail in this directory, modify the update.js like so:
Save the changes, and upload the new update.js file to the directory.

I would probably do it someway like this, since there's a bit of extra control here over how it's presented (the author name, title, etc.), and
you don't have to murk around with html when you make an update.

Since I find fanart to be one of the great milestones of a comic's success, I always put up fanart in the regular archives on days when I don't update. It might be a little annoying for someone reading through the archives, but... well, they know what days I update so they can hit the calender function if they want. ^_~

I've done the javascript viewer thing, hand-coded pages, putting them in the archives - and I put up this page with thumbnails and links to them (and ones I've done for other people). Since I'm not on CG anymore, I *could* do some sort of PHP-based gallery thing, I suppose. But I haven't. (At least not yet!)

(This reminds me, I need to update that page...)

I do mine by hand. I don't recommend it

Back when I was at freewebs I set up an "Extras" page for that kind of thing. I've been meaning to move it all over to Carbon Made but havent gotten around to it.

Its still up, http://www.freewebs.com/gnerdsextras

yeah I know, sextras, hahahha.

Oh and if youre interested, this is my Carbon Made account: http://sergexiii.carbonmade.com/

BKR wrote:Right now, everything I do is just with html, but in the future, I would probably use Javascript for everything. I'm going to code something now for fun, and then probably edit this and get back to you.

Edit: Here's what I would do: http://jarcuum.comicgenesis.com/javascript_images/

Relevent files are update.js and index.html

It is pretty much the same idea as KKB's, but it generates the list of images as well as the individual image pages.

So if you want to add an image you would put the image and it's thumbnail in this directory, modify the update.js like so:

Code: Select all

//the last image index was 1, so we 
//copy it and change it to the below

images[2].title = "Another art piece";
images[2].author = "A Person"
images[2].url = "image_name.jpg";
images[2].thumb="thumb_name.jpg";
images[2].description="this is a description to give the image some context.";

Save the changes, and upload the new update.js file to the directory.

I would probably do it someway like this, since there's a bit of extra control here over how it's presented (the author name, title, etc.), and
you don't have to murk around with html when you make an update.

Javascript can be used to generate your entire page if you want, the problem is that some people turn it off or browsers have it off by default or don't support it. In cases like this, those people won't have access to those features. So if you do use Javascript, you should only use it on parts of your site that are 'extras'. I wouldn't recommend using it for main aspects, such as site navigation or things like that.

Thanks for the input, guys. You have some interesting approaches to the problem, and I might tinker with some Java scripts eventually.

In the meantime, I think I'll just redesign my pages to make them a little more user-friendly when dealing with a larger number of images (I'm thinking a horizontal layout and hover text.)

Biev wrote:I do mine by hand. I don't recommend it

Same here. I only have six pieces of fanart, and I don't get them often, but adding them can be a surprising pain if you're not careful with your filenames.

I also do it the old fashioned way, using notepad and charcoal.

I make thumbnails manually and link them to wievimage.html.

I use photoshop to generate it automatically for me.

Cope wrote:I also do it the old fashioned way, using notepad and charcoal.

I co-sign with this, and it's so bloody hard cause of my easily fanartable characters.

But we think you're all the more awesome for it, K-Dawg.

KittyKatBlack wrote:Javascript can be used to generate your entire page if you want, the problem is that some people turn it off or browsers have it off by default or don't support it. In cases like this, those people won't have access to those features. So if you do use Javascript, you should only use it on parts of your site that are 'extras'. I wouldn't recommend using it for main aspects, such as site navigation or things like that.

One of the reasons why server side scripting is being prefered nowadays. However, there's not much harm done in assuming your viewers have javascript enabled considering how widespread it's support is.

But if one would insist, my (personal) solution to this would be, ironically, more Javascript. There's a nice application (not a browser) that uses Javascript for scripting that I could use to generate the html files for me. All I would have to do is place the image in a directory, along with a similarly named text file containing the descriptive info, run the executable, and then upload the resulting generated html and thumbnail files to the server.

If you can't tell, I use Javascript a lot.