The weekend so far

[mdlbear]

So far it's been a relatively productive weekend, as such things go:

• Bought and installed new fluorescent lights for the back bathroom. The fixture wants 5w candelabra-base bulbs, and they don't seem to last nearly as long as they ought to.
• Bought a splice for the drip irrigation tubing I stupidly cut through a couple of weeks ago when I was pruning the roses. I'll install it this afternoon, maybe, after things warm up a little.
• Went to the Container Store to pick up the clip-on bookends that were back-ordered when I made my last purchase there last Saturday.
• Bought a small-footprint PC case I've had my eye on for a while. Not quite as easy to install as it should be, and I can't find the backplate for my little MB. But it'll be better than my first attempt at a home-built wooden box. In particular it will be lighter.
• Bought tax software (TaxCut).
• Bought boxed set of three Dorothy Sayers DVD's (the ones with Harriet Vane) as a Valentine's present for the flower_cat. Very romantic. She's watching Gaudy Night now.
• Installed Gallery on gc.thestarport.org, mainly for the chaoswolf. Complicated by the fact that the version that ships with Debian stable is rather old, and I wanted some of the newer features. Then had to work around stylesheet formatting stupidities that don't work with my default browser settings. But it seems to be working now. Not as versatile as I expected: doesn't handle virtual hosts well, or let users maintain their own separate galleries. (Or maybe I just haven't figured it out yet).
• Ran my usual weekly backups.

Comments

[asavitzk.livejournal.com]

Check out http://www.wilsonkids.net/gallery/ - it's where my savitzky.com photo gallery is. There are a number of seperate galleries and each one has a different "administrator". Only limit really is that the individual admins can't create new accounts. They can only select which existing accounts have which rights to their particular galleries.

Not exactly

[mdlbear]

In Gallery terminology, each of the separate "galleries" is actually an "album", and everybody is making what Gallery calls "nested albums". You can see this easily from the fact that the top-level list claims to have "6 albums" in it. I have, in fact, done that for my two current users.

The effect is very similar, but as you point out the users can't control accounts, skins, and so on. In a system where each user has shell access, they can each install their own copy of the entire Gallery package, but it's wasteful. There's a similar form of wastage when you have multiple virtual hosts on one real computer: each VH needs its own copy of the Gallery files.

One could fix this with dilligent hacking -- most of my web apps are sharable this way -- but it would be pretty painful. The easiest way is to make all the config files for a virtual host hang off the document root in a fixed place. Ugly, but the alternatives require root access and can be rather scary.