[Clipart] Filenames

Nicu Buculei nicu at apsro.com
Wed Dec 14 22:57:06 PST 2005


Michael Moore wrote:
> As I was browsing the clipart, I thought of something that might make
> it easier to use.  What if the contributor's name wasn't included in
> the file name?
> 
> For example, instead of "classic_tux_garoth", just "classic_tux" or
> instead of "yang_sergio_luiz_araujo" just "ying_yang".
> 
> I think it would make them easier to browse. I'm sure it's fun to see
> your name on the released clipart files, but I'm not sure it's
> helpful. Maybe a "credits" file could be included instead?

This has nothing to do with author's pride, the real cause is out 
less-than-perfect infrastructure.

Is a natural thing for people to put descriptive and obvious name to 
their images and for general clipart many files *will* have the same 
file name (for example we can get a lot of 'flower.svg' from different 
authors). I am not sure about this, but i suspect in the early days of 
the project we lost a number of submissions because of overwrite by new 
files with the same name.

This is why we needed a way to generate *unique* filenames for each file 
and the solution used was to include the author name in the file name 
(IIRC, i proposed at the time to include also the submission date).

We have all relevant info (clipart title, author name, keywords, etc.) 
inside metadata, so practically we could use *any* filename, even 
something like "a3ek5ocj79osdr.svg" (also the browsing could be based 
entirely on metadata).

IMO, our best option at the moment is to move our asses and start 
working on adapting ccHost for our specific needs, roll it out for the 
site infrastructure and be all happy. How good are your php skills? Can 
you help on this?

-- 
nicu



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