Donna took quite a few pictures at the conference in Philadelphia last week, which she will be uploading into her blog soon. Several of the pictures she took was of posters, which must be viewed at a fairly large size if the writing on them is to be legible. This means that the full-size pictures can be larger than the average-person's computer screen.
The standard Movable Type code that it (politely) generates when uploading a picture doesn't handle this very well. The window that the picture appears in (once you click on the thumbnail) is set to have no scroll bars and is not resizable. This means that you are out of luck about seeing the entire picture unless you can move the entire window around. So I decided to try to change it.
I'm a programmer (well, my real job is more complicated to describe than that, but I just say I'm a programmer for simplicity's sake), and I knew Movable Type (MT) was written in Perl. Perl is an interpreted language, so the code would not be compiled and should be in plain text files. Easy!
The reality was only slightly harder than that. I first had to get shell access to my webserver. SSH access was initially disabled, but the always-responsive support staff at JaguarPC got it enabled in a few hours. I then had to find the file that had the code I needed to change. A find and a few judicious greps later, I found the file I was looking for: mt/lib/MT/App/CMS.pm
Not knowing what CMS stood for (I am guessing Content Management System), I plowed right in. I first copied the file to a backup, just in case I did something to break MT. Then, with vi, I found the line I wanted to change:
<a href="$url" onclick="window.open('$url','popup','width=$width,height=$height,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false">$link</a>
and changed the "scrollbars=no,resizable=no" to "scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes".
I have not tested this yet, but I am pretty confident this will do what I expect. You can check Donna's blog in a few days to check and see for yourself.
At the conference, Donna got some interest from several people about her blog, including an offer to relocate it to the National School Reform Faculty website! Lots of exciting possibilities there, so stay tuned.
Posted by Rob Reid at January 23, 2004 04:40 PMIt did indeed work. Check out this blog entry to see.
Posted by: Rob at April 15, 2004 08:34 PM