Sup nixers,

A little while ago there was discussion about setting up a nixers.net subdomain to serve as an image gallery of our screenshots, taking its images from our own self-hosted screenshots pages, and centralising them in an easy-to-navigate place. The idea is that this will supplement the screenshots forum thread, where the thread's advantage is that it facilitates discussion, but its disadvantage is navigability if you just want to check out some screenshots.

This has now been set up at https://screenshots.nixers.net!

How to add yourself:

1. Host a page on your website that contains your screenshots, where the img or a HTML tags that point to your screenshots have the attribute rel="nix".
   
2. Add your display name and the URL to your webpage to the list.
   

A cronjob run hourly checks the list, downloads any new images, and regenerates the pages on screenshots.nixers.net, using the script and templates over on github.

TODOs (please feel free to make commits to the github repository):

• The styling is very basic, so the appearance could do with some love.
  

Please leave comments/feedback with respect to how it works, how it looks etc.

I hope you enjoy!

I'm glad you managed to set it up, and hope it will catch up and be useful to members !

I skimmed a bit through the code and found this at the top:

Why bother caching images ? You have a good way to extract the <img> tag, so you could simply reuse it as-is, and rely on user's servers to serve the image. This would save both disk space, speed and processing power at every job run.

(03-10-2020, 12:01 PM)z3bra Wrote: Why bother caching images ? You have a good way to extract the <img> tag, so you could simply reuse it as-is, and rely on user's servers to serve the image. This would save both disk space, speed and processing power at every job run.

Damn, that is a great idea. I'm not too worried about processing power (most of the time no new images will be added), but who knows about disk space. If the images were srced directly from their origin, presumably this will be equivalent in terms of page-loading speed (assuming all servers have the same connectivity)?

This would put less strain on a single server to serve all these images, save disk space and let users in control of their content, for exampme if they want to remove a screenshot or replace it.

edit: btw, I generated a list from an old scrot directory that is (suprisingly!) still up ! If someone wants to add it to the list: http://pub.z3bra.org/img/wm/nx.html

edit2: would a gopher link work here ?

We should definitely work on two things:

• Add loading="lazy"
  
• Compress the images to other formats like webp or avif, see it's useful
  

(03-10-2020, 02:46 PM)venam Wrote: We should definitely work on two things:

• Add loading="lazy"
  
• Compress the images to other formats like webp or avif, see it's useful
  

In my experience all website that compress images for a "better user experience" ended up making that experience worse. Especially in terms of screenshots (see imgur and friends for example). I do agree that these new shiny formats are cool, but I wouldn't enforce that on nixers. If they want to use avif or webp, they'll convert their scrot before uploading right ?

(03-10-2020, 02:46 PM)venam Wrote: Add loading="lazy"

Done.

(03-10-2020, 12:01 PM)z3bra Wrote: rely on user's servers to serve the image.

Also done.

venam on IRC: "maybe we should also limit the number of screenshots per user, like maybe pick 5-7 random ones"
I think this would be a good idea for the index page, but we can still include all images on the user pages. It's trivial to regenerate the pages so I'll stick it into the same hourly cronjob.

In a similar vein, I think it'd be good to randomise the order that users appear on the index page.

All above done, too :)

(04-10-2020, 10:17 AM)mcol Wrote: All above done, too :)

Nice work mcol

Well done indeed ! can someone add mine btw please ? I don't have access to the project.

yep you're up there now z3bra

(03-10-2020, 11:30 AM)mcol Wrote: Host a page on your website that contains your screenshots

Any other options for the plebs without a website?

Don't be a pleb! But really this is a good question. All the script that makes the website does is scrape links from a page and include them in the output, so it might be possible to extend it a bit to work with, for example, an imgur gallery page. I just checked out a random gallery and it looks like the right images might be easily identifiable so that could work.

I don't know much about image hosting website including imgur, so there might be problems with this approach that I'm not aware of. How long do images stay up? Are there better alternatives than imgur?

Quote:Any other options for the plebs without a website?

We provide gopher space hosting at g.nixers.net. You can serve an HTML page consisting of a directory image listing, for example:


With an index.html like:

Which would be weird though, given that Gopher is not made for inline images and most browsers don’t support the protocol anymore.

Unfortunately that would make screenshots.nixers.net only (fully) viewable from a client that supports gopher.

(11-10-2020, 04:20 PM)mcol Wrote: Unfortunately that would make screenshots.nixers.net only (fully) viewable from a client that supports gopher.

Hmmm so it's not worth trying? I have set up a gopherhole at g.nixers.net so I could always try this.

(11-10-2020, 11:01 PM)Ramiferous Wrote: Hmmm so it's not worth trying?

Try what exactly? As jkl says above, gopher doesn't do inline images so it would be a different experience than the existing page. I'm not saying it won't work, it's just that I figure an image gallery would be best suited to html.

venam on IRC suggested an alternative image host: github. You could make a repository to store your images and an html file that contains the full URLs to your images in the repo. The html file can go into the nixers screenshots list, and that is what would be scanned to get the links to all your images.

(11-10-2020, 06:37 AM)Ramiferous Wrote:

(03-10-2020, 11:30 AM)mcol Wrote: Host a page on your website that contains your screenshots

Any other options for the plebs without a website?

I can host some scrotz for you on my l0bster site if you want.

(13-10-2020, 01:45 PM)mcol Wrote:

(11-10-2020, 11:01 PM)Ramiferous Wrote: Hmmm so it's not worth trying?

Try what exactly? As jkl says above, gopher doesn't do inline images so it would be a different experience than the existing page. I'm not saying it won't work, it's just that I figure an image gallery would be best suited to html.

gopher menus don't support inline images. You can however serve HTML files over gopher, which is then up to the client to display properly. However, no browser (other than lynx amd the likes) support gopher:// links, so they won't be able to retrieve the images. You can however tweak to links to use the floodgap HTTP gateway ☺

(13-10-2020, 06:41 PM)z3bra Wrote:

(13-10-2020, 01:45 PM)mcol Wrote:

(11-10-2020, 11:01 PM)Ramiferous Wrote: Hmmm so it's not worth trying?

Try what exactly? As jkl says above, gopher doesn't do inline images so it would be a different experience than the existing page. I'm not saying it won't work, it's just that I figure an image gallery would be best suited to html.

gopher menus don't support inline images. You can however serve HTML files over gopher, which is then up to the client to display properly. However, no browser (other than lynx amd the likes) support gopher:// links, so they won't be able to retrieve the images. You can however tweak to links to use the floodgap HTTP gateway ☺

Yeah, exactly. I wouldn't be viewing my screenshots in my gopher client, just hosting them there using the HTTP gateway.

But also, perhaps a github repo is a simpler solution.

(13-10-2020, 03:17 PM)l0bster Wrote: I can host some scrotz for you on my l0bster site if you want.

Thanks l0bster, will see if I can get my own solution sorted first, but might hit you up if I need.

(13-10-2020, 01:45 PM)mcol Wrote: venam on IRC suggested an alternative image host: github. You could make a repository to store your images and an html file that contains the full URLs to your images in the repo. The html file can go into the nixers screenshots list, and that is what would be scanned to get the links to all your images.

This might be worth a try first I think.

(13-10-2020, 06:41 PM)z3bra Wrote: gopher menus don't support inline images

Ah I see, right.

Using a gopher-to-http proxy for links to images seems like unnecessary complexity but yeah I suppose it would work if you stuck some images on g.nixers.net and add the proxied URL to the list :P

(04-10-2020, 02:04 PM)z3bra Wrote: http://pub.z3bra.org/img/wm/nx.html

Hey z3bra, I'm curious what wallpaper script you've got going on in some of those shots.. I've found hashwall, but what about the one where it's split horizontally and looks as if it's glitching?

Also.. got a link to ptii ?

also, please add:

Quote:Ramiferous https://github.com/Ramiferous/NetBSD/blo...index.html

(20-10-2020, 11:31 PM)Ramiferous Wrote: Nixers
also, please add:

Quote:
Ramiferous https://github.com/Ramiferous/NetBSD/blo...index.html

I've added your page, however the images are not direct links, can you fix that?

(20-10-2020, 11:12 PM)Ramiferous Wrote:

(04-10-2020, 02:04 PM)z3bra Wrote: http://pub.z3bra.org/img/wm/nx.html

Hey z3bra, I'm curious what wallpaper script you've got going on in some of those shots.. I've found hashwall, but what about the one where it's split horizontally and looks as if it's glitching?

Also.. got a link to ptii ?

The "glitches" are ants digging on tge root window. Search for "xantfarm". As for ptii... You probably don't want it. It is old, badly written and full of bugs:

git://z3bra.org/ptii.git

(21-10-2020, 08:32 AM)z3bra Wrote: It is old, badly written and full of bugs

lol, now I'm more curious.

(21-10-2020, 08:32 AM)z3bra Wrote: git://z3bra.org/ptii.git

Cheers!

(21-10-2020, 04:21 AM)venam Wrote: I've added your page, however the images are not direct links, can you fix that?

Oops! updated!

Nice pics rami, super nice.

(21-10-2020, 08:32 AM)z3bra Wrote: The "glitches" are ants digging on tge root window. Search for "xantfarm"

Lol this is awesome.

my scrots: https://github.com/nixers-projects/sites/pull/12

I've moved to Codeberg. I did update the sites list on my "fork" but yeah, not totally sure if you'd catch that Venam.

New link to my index.html is: https://codeberg.org/Ramiferous/NetBSD/r...index.html