Welcome to tolink, a Haskell programm

(2011-09-06)

Hi.

If you come this far, you are about to test my only haskall program that ever made it into something productive. It's called tolink and it is really AMAZING! ;-)

I needed some program to resize a bunch of jpg files and build an according set html files to link them together. At the time, back in the early 2000s, I had a programming course in haskell (as an example in functional languages) and I though "what the frell, just try it in haskell". Could have done it in C, but hey, why do it in a simple way when you can do it in a complicated way? ;-)

It was a time when there were no or only a few free (as in "free of charge") image hosters and not every webserver supported php or other srcipts. Nowadays it might seem obsolete, but I personally still like to host my images on my own server or domains. It's just a matter of pride (and sometimes of copyright issues).

Now it is 2011 and I needed to recompile the binaries, because they stopped working. Some linking was broken. (Should have build a static bin...) ;-) I had to go way back into the backup folders on some DVDs to find the source, and while I was on it I changed some minor things. It still works in the same way it always did, so it's not very user friendly, but I like this way.

Whatever, here is what you need to run it:

Windows 2000 or XP (maybe any other NT, didn't test it, don't have it, see?) OR Linux (I build and use it on Gentoo)
installed ImageMagick convert
To compile the source: Glasgow Haskell Compiler

(BSD, Mac or other unix-like systems might work, too, as long as there is a haskell compiler and ImageMagick available, see above.)

To run the program:

Copy the three files (Windows: tolink.exe, conv.exe, tl.bat; Linux: tolink, conv, tl.sh) into the folder where your jpgs are
Start the script (Windows: tl.bat; Linux: tl.sh)

After that you will have a directory called output with all your cooooool jpgs shrinked to 33% together with some nice html-files linking them all together and a second directory called output/thumbs with the same coooooool jpgs shrinked further down to 15%. (These are the standard values, easily changed on the command line.)

Compiling:

To compile you need ghc. I use version 6.12.3, others might work, I don't know. However, in Linux - after unpacking - type:

    ghc --make tonlink
    mv a.out tolink
    ghc --make conv
    mv a.out conv

(You might want to strip the binaries afterwards.)

In Windows, open a shell (cmd.exe) and change to the foler you've unpacked the source to, then type:

    ghc --make tonlink
    move a.out tolink
    ghc --make conv
    move a.out conv

Use:

Copy the executables and shell scripts to the folder with your jpgs, then execute tl.

CHANGELOG:

1.1:  * minor changes
1.0:  * Fixed off-by-one issue with page count
1.0a: * unified convert and convert-linux
      * pictures may now be embedded into html pages
      * English translation
0.9:  * first release

Newest Versions always in my blog.