Brian's Blog

Edited for clarity 11/29/04.

While exploring Nanoblogger I came across a cool plugin that lets you include a picture in your entries. It's a recent release and the author hasn't written much documentation yet, so I thought I'd put here how I got it working here. It's not hard at all.

First, I downloaded the plugin and copied it to where I have Nanoblogger installed. Then I untared it which should put everything where it needs to be in the plugins directory. After that I edited the picture.sh that was put into plugins/entry, searched for http and changed the URLs I found to point to my blog. I only changed up to the occurrence of /$ARCHIVES and left everything else alone. After that I changed to my images directory and did a mkdir small. Finally, I edited entry.htm and permalink_entry.html in my templates directory and added $NB_Picture just above the line containing $NB_EntryBody.

Now, at this point I just copied the picture of my choice to my blog_dir and added an entry. In this case a picture of my wife and youngest daughter. The picture needs to be either a png or jpg and be called current.jpg or current.png. I noticed it uses imagemagick to convert pictures so if you get an error like I did then check that you have imagemagick installed and working. I run Slackware so it was just a matter of downloading the slackpack and installing it.

Also you will have to replace all occurences of "http://cgi.ethz.ch/~scdaniel/weblog/" in plugins/entry/picture.sh with "http://your.blog.url" before it will work.

I'm not the author so I don't know specifically what the plugin does but I did observe that it takes the current.{jpg,png} and renames it to the same format as your articles permalink. In the case of this entry the image was renamed from current.jpg to 2004-11-20T11_13_11.jpg and moved to [blog_dir]/images while a thumbnail by the same name was created in [blog_dir]/images/small. The original current.{jpg,png} file is then not in your blog_dir anymore. If you want to link to the image in your blog manually you'll have to reference it in [blog_dir]/images. ie <img src="[blog_dir]/images/2004-11-20T11_13_11.jpg">

I hope I have this accurate. If there is anything wrong shoot me an E-mail and I'll fix it. The plugin can be found at sourceforge.net