Image thumbnailer for Pebble

Sun, 23 May 2010 08:54:00 GMT

This blog uses the Pebble package for delivering content. Pebble isn't a particularly common blogging package but it fits my purely personal and subjective requirements:

Not written in PHP (blegh)
Open source, and something in Java would be nice
Doesn't use a database and uses flat files that I can manage manually if I need to
Good RSS, search, tag and category management
Can be restyled easily

The old incarnation of this blog used MovableType but that doesn't really tick the Open Source box any more. blogs.sun.com uses Roller but that requires a database back-end. All these constraints combined to give a pretty short list of candidates, i.e. Pebble.

One thing that Pebble lacks is an image thumbnailer. I'm not bothered about glossy JavaScript solutions such as Lightbox, and I'm quite happy to type in HTML table definitions. All I wanted was something to save me the tedium of manually generating the thumbnails and typing in the HTML to display them and link to the full-size image in a popup window. MovableType has this feature but Pebble doesn't so I sat down one evening and knocked together an equivalent as a Pebble plugin, using the standard Java2D APIs to do the image manipulation. All the thumbnails on this site are done with it, and I've submitted this as a patch to Pebble so hopefully it will make it into a future release.

Update

The patch has been accepted and should be appearing in a future version of Pebble.

Alan's Ramblings - photo tag

Image thumbnailer for Pebble

Update