Posts Categorized: Small Project

Rounded Corner Script

Posted by & filed under linux, Programming, Small Project.

Script Download: rounded_corner.sh (v2)

Ever wanted a script that would round the corners of images for you?  Well, if you said yes, I wrote myself a bash script to do just that.  As of this post it can do the following: round of corners of images and it can also add a glass-bubble effect as described in the ImageMagick tutorials.  You can specify the border radius and a background color, which is handy if you are making JPEGs.  The script’s help screen is shown below, as well as a couple of samples.  Radius sizes are in pixels.

./rounded_corner.sh <inputfile> <outputfile> [options]
  -m   Method [plain or glass-bubble]
  -r   Corner Radius
  -b   Background Color
Method can be plain or glass-bubble at the moment. (default: plain)
Radius specifies the radius of the rounded corners. (default: 15)

Note: This should be able to function as filter command, so if you wanted
rounded thumbnails of a particular size you can:
convert <bigfile> -resize 200x200 png:- | ./rounded_corner.sh png:- smallrounded.png" 1>&2

Danbooru and a meta-data filesystem

Posted by & filed under Small Project.

Yeah, I could probably file this one under “overkill.”  I’ve managed to set up a virtual machine running Danbooru so that I may finally get my personal photo collection organized AND be able to do so regardless of operating system I choose to boot.

The traditional hierarchial manner of organizing files is a complete waste of time.  Even assuming you can actually find anything again, you’ve already wasted several hours performing the initial organization.  I like the idea of being able to store a photo with some tags or other meta data and then be able to SEARCH it instead of browsing for it.  It would be nice if this ability were built directly into the file system though.  WinFS and Apple’s spotlight seem promising so I may set out to investigate their potential at some point in the future.

Job Hunting: A practical use for aggregated RSS feeds

Posted by & filed under Small Project.

A friend of mine was semi-recently laid off from his retail sales job, and I was wondering if I could use any of my knowledgeto help him in his search for jobs.  Then it hit me: RSS feeds!   I could create an RSS feed of the latest job postings in our area from the sites he checks for jobs.  This way he would save time in his search.  Since he mainly used craigslist and Washington WorkSource, I only needed to pull feeds from two sites.  To keep the RSS feeds relevant, I limited categories pulled.  Now there was one minor hitch with this idea.

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Yahoo Pipes + CSV = Aggregated RSS

Posted by & filed under Small Project.

You can use Yahoo Pipes to create an aggregated RSS feed from a CSV file you maintain.  It’s fairly easy too, which is awesome.  For those who are not familiar with Yahoo Pipes, it’s a beta product by Yahoo that makes it easy to create simple mashups of content available on the Internet, read more about it on the Yahoo Pipes homepage if you so please.

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Simple aggregated RSS Feed with Pipes

Posted by & filed under Small Project.

Answering a question that was posed at work regarding RSS feeds and Yahoo Pipes.

Q: How can I make an aggregated RSS feed in Pipes?

A: If you have a set of RSS feeds you’d like to include in an aggregated feed, simply drag the fetch feed module into the workspace and click the addition (plus) button to add more source URLs for the module.  Then send the output to the pipe output. When you name and save the pipe, you’ll be able to get it as an RSS feed, or in a multitude of other formats.

linker – Decoupled Link List Management

Posted by & filed under Small Project.

Occasionally, you’ll have a project where one of the last minute ideas is to add a manageable list of links to a webpage or series of webpages.  Nothing fancy, just a list of links that can be plopped into a layout.

Well, this little project allows you to quickly set up a web-based administration for simple link lists.  This isn’t a full blown manager, but simply a piece of a larger project.  Should readily integrate into existing solutions if you’re willing to do some code.  At any rate, you provide the links in an easy to use back-end and then can pull that list in a variety of formats by hitting index.php (or whatever you choose to actually pull the list, it’s fairly easy to change.)  Currently by default it can give you a raw html list, an rss feed, or the list in javascript form.  Simply unpack it, make sure the data folder is writeable, set the password in config.php and then hit admin.php and off you go.  A demo is available. It’s reset every half hour, and the password is ‘demo’.

I plan to release a version with some link generators for this in the coming weeks, until then you’ll need to hand-write the actual URLs to pull the lists.

Download Project – linker