how do they do that?

the site has recently been rewritten in ColdFusion 7 (it was ColdFusion 5), and also utilises ImageMagick, mod_perl, and MySQL. It was our first CF7 site, and we have fallen with glee upon the object oriented aspects, so now much of it is rewritten with components, making it easier to maintain.

Guestbook

the guestbook submission uses a combination of a secure form-to-mail script (written by ourselves), and a MySQL database to hold the submissions. The guestbook entries are displayed with ColdFusion. The same secure script is also used for the Send To Friend thing (sorry - not very technical, but inspiration deserted us).

Menus

are dynamically generated from the database, and displayed via javascript and CSS. Static sites? just say no ...

Catwatching

the catwatching stuff is an adjunct to the mod_perl scripting that drives the catcam images. The script writes a session cookie, and an entry in a table in the cats' MySQL database. We then use some Coldfusion code to poll the database, and display the results in a .cfm page, in an iframe and/or a pop-up window, which auto-refreshes every five minutes. There may well be a neater way to do this, but it works ...

CatCams

if you're interested in how we overlay the images, it's here.

the CatCams work like this:

there are six cameras, and we spend far too much time running around the house adjusting them so there's something to look at. At last, they are all Axis ethernet cams - known on the network as Otto, Twoflower, Gaffer, Io, Imp and Laddie. The Axes have been acquired by keeping a careful eye on eBay, as they are far more expensive than an ordinary webcam. When I think we started with a single Intel Pro USB camera back in 1999 ...

if you're wondering why we name the Axis cameras as we do, our LAN runs with Discworld (from the Terry Pratchett books) naming conventions. As indeed do the cats! The domain is ramtops.org, and all the machines on the network are named from characters in the books. If you read them, you'll understand, and if you don't, it's probably not worth us trying to explain ... hie yourself off to www.lspace.org to find out more.

each camera uploads an image to our inhouse Linux Apache server, so that we can monitor the pictures here without impacting the web site stats, and from there to jordan-cats.org via ssh every 45 seconds while it's running (thank ghod for cable modem *and* DSL!), at which point some very clever server-side mod_perl code (written by Pete, bless 'im) kicks in and does what you see in your browser.

working from a config file, itself maintained by a password protected web form, the CatCam script creates the contents of the popup window and sends you the latest image every 45 seconds, or the unavailable image if no updated picture has been received from here for 10 minutes.

in addition the cycling popup window rotates through the available images every 45 seconds, and displays the "unavailable" image only if no new images have been received from here for ten minutes. Also, the cycling window only displays images which have been updated in the past ten minutes, so you don't get to see shots that you have already seen (although it may often seem like this, as the damn cats spend most of their time asleep!). And if you're wondering just who the clever people are who have done all this, we are horus web engineering ltd, a web engineering company located near Bristol, in the UK.

the script for the camera popup cycling window only uses a session cookie in your browser to keep track of which image(s) you last saw - this cookie is deleted when you exit your browser, and we do not track your usage at all, except via our standard Apache weblogs, which do not identify you personally. It also uses another session cookie to track who is using the site; this writes to a MySQL table, and is pulled out again by some ColdFusion scripting. The cookie is deleted when you exit your browser, and we can't identify who you are from it.

overlays on the webcam images are done on the fly with ImageMagick, a lovely piece of software which runs on our webserver, and allows us to do all manner of things.

and the Blog is ColdFusion based BlogCFC from the industrious Ray Camden - a huge vote of thanks to him, as he us saved me hours of work in writing our own. Thanks are also due to Peter Farrel of Maestro Publishing for the Captcha code.