hourlyimage

A simple database-free website engine that displays time-sensitive images by regularly scanning a directory and its subdirectories -- which have a specific file structure -- for images. Images are displayed with pretty URLs. RSS feeds are available for posts by day or by hour.

How it works

Once the site is installed and running, content is provided via FTP (or any other method that gets the images into the appropriate directories) using the following file structure:

base directory
`-year
  `-month
  `-month
  `-month
    `-day
      `-hour.jpg
      `-hour.jpg
      `-hour.jpg
    `-day
  `-month
  `-month
`-year
  `-month
    `-day
      `-hour.jpg
      `-hour.jpg
  `-month
`-year

For example, if in your settings, your base directory is /myimages and you wanted to put in images for 1pm, 2pm and 3pm on December 21 of 2011, your structure would look like this:

my images
`-2011
  `-12
    `-21
      `- 13.jpg
      `- 14.jpg
      `- 15.jpg

This would create the following available pages on your site:

A summary for 2011: http://yoursite.com/images/2011/
A summary for December of 2011: http://yoursite.com/images/2011/12/
All images for December 21, 2011: http://yoursite.com/images/2011/12/21/
The image for 1pm on December 21, 2011: http://yoursite.com/images/2011/12/21/13/
The image for 2pm on December 21, 2011: http://yoursite.com/images/2011/12/21/14/
The image for 3pm on December 21, 2011: http://yoursite.com/images/2011/12/21/15/

It would also update the daily RSS feed, adding the new images to the December 21 entry, and the hourly RSS feed with 3 new entries, one for each hour.

Installation

Install hourlyimage
Create config file with the following required configuration values:

IMAGE_LOCATION_DIR - The full file path to where your images are stored.
IMAGE_LOCATION_URL - The relative URL path to where your images should be displayed on the site. I recommend putting a symlink inside your /static directory to where IMAGE_LOCATION_DIR is.
TIMEZONE - The pytz-formatted timezone where you are.
OFFSET_HOURS - The number of hours to wait before displaying an image. For example, OFFSET_HOURS = 24 means the latest image shown would be from exactly one day ago.
SITE_DOMAIN - Your website's domain name.
STATIC_PAGE_DIR - The location to where your static page HTML files live.
DEFAULT_THEME - The name of the theme you want to use. Usually corresponds with the name of a directory inside hourlyimage/hourlyimage/themes/. More information on Flask-Themes here.

Create an environment variable HOURLYIMAGE_SETTINGS pointing to your config file:

$ export HOURLYIMAGE_SETTINGS=/path/to/your/config.py
Install dependencies.

$ cd path/to/hourlyimage

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

To run your website in test/development mode

$ cd path/to/hourlyimage/hourlyimage
$ python hourlyimage.py

To run in a production environment

See Flask's description of deployment options.

TODOs