Thursday For messages about today's picture, see Cam Notes. For posting news of your U.P. organization's events, personal greetings, and What'sUP in your neck of the woods, visit Pasty Central's Facebook page

This day over the last 16 years of the Pasty Cam
^{Printed on Recycled Internet}

Good morning and Happy New Year to all the Pasty Cam regulars who visit the What'sUP page. You'll see right away the past 16 years on this day, but the years-in-review slideshow is absent. If you really miss starting your day with the sounds of Simon Wolfe's "Tiger Bay", here is the last flash presentation slideshow I could find on January 1.

As a matter of housekeeping, we have some decisions to make by the end of next month, when we will begin year number 18 of the Pasty Cam. How do we handle a table with 17 previous years' pictures ?! And our slideshow format has become a little obsolete by the industry's migration to HTML5 and away from Flash. I wouldn't ask just anybody who stumbles on this website to help us with such matters, but I don't mind asking those of you who made it to this page on purpose, to see the direction you would like our daily format to take. And if anybody out there knows HTML5 programming, I'm sure we could rustle up some pasties as a reward for engineering the code to enfold an mp3 and 18 years worth of systematically arranged daily photos for us to review each day.

There are many ways we need to update pasty.com, but with around 15,000 pages, it is not a trivial task. Your thoughts here are appreciated, and we'll plan to continue this converstion on tomorrow's "What'sUP" page.

Wonder when the Rose Parade begins? :o)

Whoops. Upload gave unexpected results. Wait awhile before posting anything, and I'll try to get this straightened out.

Now it appears the 16-year table is OK. Never know what we'll encounter when a new year appears, along with a whole new set of folders on the server.

Feel free to post, and sorry if anyone was dropped while we fixed the pages this morning.

Happy New Year's Pasty'ians!

Sounds like you have a monumental task ahead of you, Charlie. I had to step back a moment and think my gosh, has it really been almost 18 years already?? I've been visiting these pages since last century and have seen Pasty change and grow along the way, always for the better I might add! Unfortunately, I don't know HTML5 well enough to be of any serious help, but I'll think about some of the other items and get with you Charlie..... maybe at Winter Carnival since Nat and I will be UP this year.

Happy New Year, Charlie. Having worked with tables and arrays back in the dinosaur age of computers I have an appreciation for your dilemma. Is it possible to use the 2013 program (for lack of better terminology) for the most current years until such time the problem is solved?

Happy New Year!

...and here I thought it was just a matter of updating Flash Player and clicking away. :-(

Charlie, when you reach Heaven's gate and God asks you what you've done for other people, I think he will be very impressed and pleased when you show him (among your other jewels) 15,000+ pages of joy you've given to others. I know I am!

Beautifully said, Misschiefie! Thanks, Charlie for all the wonderful
work you do. Hope you and Edie have a healthy new year.

I have to agree with Kosk on Martha's words...done
beautifully. Thanks to Charlie and Edie for
everything they've done to keep pasty up and running.
And thanks to Mary for all of her wonderful words in
describing some of the best pictures we'll ever see
in our lives.

As for your problem, I can't help you. But as for
myself, I sure would miss the slideshow!!

Just some thoughts ...

I see extremely little value to the 4X4 (or whatever size) matrix of pictures, unless they're clickable thumbnails.

As it is, I can right click on each photo in turn in that matrix, choose View Image from the popup menu, then right click on the resulting image, and use Firefox ImageZoom's ImageFit (an add-on feature) to "fit-to-screen". Yes, that works, but 'tis really quite a painfully tedious exercise. However, I do routinely use that technique for the picture(s) of the day on the Cam Notes page.

I'd far prefer to have a full slide show of all of the however many historical images of the day -- but full screen please, not that ridiculous, primitive Flash.

Of course I can use [Windows Start Menu | Accessories | Ease of Access | Magnifier¹] to stretch that absurd "Flash" presentation to nearly "fit-to-screen" size, then kill the Magnifier afterward. But again, just a tedious work-around.

(¹I have that Magnifier pinned to my taskbar for convenient access.)

What would be really nice would be if all of the images were stored in a relational database with a SQL driven query method to find the pertinent image(s). Add a GUI interface and any visitor could also actually find images in the database, something that is virtually impossible now! Of course that would require adding query-able text fields associated with each image. Now that would be a huge bunch of work!

The same technique could be used to find messages as well if the messages were also stored in the same or a separate relational database, another impossibly huge reorganization that would surely require an automated conversion tool and a huge amount of "blood, sweat and tears".

How's that for a fantastic pipe-dream? :-)

HTML5? Sorry, I haven't done any HTML-anything.

WOW FRNash, being as computer illiterate as I am, you
completely lost me, lol. However, I totally agree
with what you said about the tiny pictures. They're
pretty useless to me since I can barely see them. I
didn't know we could right click on them to make them
larger, but it would still be nice to know who took
the picture without having to go back to that day in
pasty history. After that, you lost me :-)

OH, and I don't have "view image" when I right click
on them. I have open, copy, page, but no view!

Deb, perhaps that's another Firefox add-on (I can't be sure, I have been using that feature for eons, and can't be sure where it came from. I'd have to investigate further.)

If you are using the Firefox browser, go up to the menu and click on Tools then Add-ons, then enter "View Image" (without the quotes) in the search box in the upper right corner of the page, and click on the little magnifying glass. Maybe one of the listed add-ons is what you'll need.

Thanks FRNash, but I don't have menu either. I found
something to click on that says "more tools", but
when I click on that, there's no Add-ons. I'll have
to have my hubby investigate some day when he's got
some extra time on his hands. Thanks for trying to
help me. I'll continue to work on this when time
permits.