maemo.org - Talk - Proposed Improvement to MaStory blogging client

After playing with MaStory, I really like it but when you use it to embed photos in Wordpress, visitors to the blog have to download a large resolution file.

Given Wordpress automatically creates smaller versions of uploaded photos, I'd rather the blog post included a smaller version which was a link to the full resolution version. (Wordpress currently does not create thumbnails for files uploaded from MaStory as MaStory doesn't report the mimetype for the image).

After a bit of investigation, I decided this wasn't possible without changes to Wordpress as well as MaStory.

So I've:

Submitted a patch to Wordpress (but I've missed the code cut off date for 3.0): http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6430
Created a plugin for Wordpress until the above patch is integrated: http://www.coralbark.net/blog/?p=127
Created an initial patch for MaStory: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9428

The way the patch works for MaStory, is that a select box is added to the bottom-right corner of the "HTML tags" window of the upload image dialog. From that select box, you choose: full size, thumbnail, medium or large. Full size gives you the current behaviour. If you choose a different size, instead of the plain img tag, something like this is inserted:

<a href="file:///home/user/MyDocs/DCIM/example.jpg"><img src="file(medium):///home/user/MyDocs/DCIM/example.jpg" /></a>

When the upload happens, assuming that the plugin is installed on the Wordpress blog, the file:// url is replaced by the full image and the file(medium):// tag is replaced by the medium scaled image.

There are a few things I want to discuss about this approach (hopefully Daniel Yerga will read this thread but other opinions from users/developers of MaStory are welcomed):

1) Are we happy extending MaStory in ways that only work if a plugin is installed in Wordpress (or some far future version of WP is used). (If the plugin isn't installed and the user tries to use this functionality, the image included in the post will be the full size image and it will link to the same image).

2) Is the bottom right corner of the "HTML tags" bit of the upload image the "right" place for the UI?

3) Most of the image options reset for each new image. I'll like this setting to persist indefinitely, presumably by adding an option to mastory.conf. Do people agree?

4) Is file(<size>):// urls the right way of denoting the resized images?

5) Anyone have other thoughts?