indexy script

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A friend and I have been working on a project that, although not Adium-related, we thought you Adium people might find cool. Mostly, though, we know a lot of Adium people have had some great experience designing message views with html and css, and we're hoping to tap into some of that talent :)

The idea is an indexing script for displaying files on the web -- sort of a web-based finder, which you can see in action here:

http://capricorn.dnsalias.org/mike/index/

Among other things, it implements icons of different sizes, automatic thumbnailing and caching of images, piles (a feature that Apple was rumored to be considering for the finder which allows one to group related files nicely), and variable sort orders.

However, perhaps the nicest feature is that it uses a simple HTML and CSS template (very similar to a message view) to define the display style. For instance, the displays we've implemented (icon, list, and piled-list) are just 50-line HTML files. You can check out the templates here:

http://capricorn.dnsalias.org/mike/index/templates/

(you should probably view source on them, since they display strangely as straight HTML). If any of you message view gurus (*cough* Brad Smith *cough cough*) want to take a crack at making templates, that would be awesome. We think the program is shiny and useful, and the idea of having a richly customizable mini-finder is a cool one.

A description of the template syntax is in the README file (http://capricorn.dnsalias.org/mike/index/README). The source code is right there in that directory too -- it's all written in OCaml. You can download it in download.tgz; you'll have to make changes to local.ml to get it to work (I haven't done any packaging yet).

A couple caveats: (1) I haven't tested it on all platforms, and (2) some of the current templates don't render right in Firefox. But that's why I'm bothering you guys :-)

-- Mike Hamburg