cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

The StoryBox project will end its gathering of media at the end of 2011, so there is still time to share any media before the time capsule closes- see http://cogdogblog.com/storybox for ways you can drop media files.

During my 15,000 mile, 5 month 2 country, 29 state/province travels I collected a Shareskian “wack sock” of media- 1230 image, video, audio, document files:

• audio recordings: 127
• documents: 18
• music: 41
• photos: 891
• videos: 147
• remixes: 6

And there is room for more! But to keep it true to the time capsule concept, the last media I will add will have to get to me by Dec 31, 2011 (at 12:59:59)

What happens then? My plan is to return all of this content online, in a yet to be created web site that would allow, ideally, people to add tags/descriptions to help characterize the content and use tools to build new content out of that (e.g. remixes). I am hoping this is something that Omeka might provide (expect an email soon, Patrick! I might need help).

I realized early that the default file list view might be unwieldy, so from the start I have been moving content into subdirectories by media type. Still, even shorter file listings are hard to scan, so over the last few months I have been creating graphic browsers for the media types.

I did find that the single view of 800 icons for the photos was a drag to load (e.g. when I had Vicki Davis’s students all hit the box at the same size, that won for a PirateBox stress test), so I have been adding a paged pagination, involving some dusting off of my Javascript skills- because the PirateBos is a python based server, and I neglected to learn python, andy interaction I have done has been in HTML and JavaScript – but I have a lot of things humming now.

For the photos I run a local php script on the mirror of the StoryBox on my laptop; this script (based on one from WebCheatSheets) is used to generate 800px preview and 100px thumbnail copies of all photos. What I do is have a directory for new photos I plan to make thumbnails for, and another one to write the new files to (“thumbs”), and this make_thumbnails.php script at the top- I can call it from a localhost/makethumbs.make_thumbnails.php url on my machine: