We're really underway, now. The brick, tree, and grass are gone, a trench has been dug for the footing, and they're prepping to pour some concrete before too long.

I thought of a kind of cool idea for a way to view the progress on our new room. What if you could do something kind of like time-lapse photos, but with a slider so you could scrub back and forth along the timeline? Once I'd thought of it, I almost had to see if I could build it.


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I'm pretty happy with the result. If you're not at all interested in what I did to make this, stop reading now and just go play with it.

Aside from building the web page interface, which was a chance to use the Yahoo UI library for the first time for the slider, I also did some automation on my PowerBook to make the whole process a bit easier. I ran into some frustration with Automator; seems like there should be ways to do some things that there aren't good ways to do. Still, it's not too bad. I managed to create an Automator application that makes the whole workflow pretty easy.

Basically, I go take pictures. I import them into iPhoto (insert memory card and click 'Ok'). Then, I add "Home Addition" to the comments of the new pictures, and add "Position_A" to the photo taken from the first position, "Position_B" to the comments of the photo taken from the second position, etc. Then I double-click the automator application icon and sit back to watch. Automatically, the photos are found, copied, renamed, scaled down for web use, and uploaded to the right folder on the web server. Once there, the web page knows how to find the files, extract the necessary metadata, and build the photo timeline.

So I can easily update the photo timeline a few times a week, or even daily.

Come back to check on the photo timeline for updates. In addition to new photos, I've got a couple of ideas for features to add, which I think will be pretty fun.

Home Addition Photo Timeline