I’ve been meaning to write a bit about how the math camp journal system eventually worked, so I suppose I’ll do so now!  (You can see the finished product here, here, here, and
here.)  I tried a couple things, but mainly relied on ImageMagick and the Python xmlrpc library written by Max Cutler.  In fact, a very nice moment mid-week involved shooting emails back and forth at 3am (Kenya time) with Max trying to figure out what was going wrong on my end.  (You’re not really developing until you’re talking to the people who wrote your libraries, I always say!)  In any case, Max was very helpful, as was his library.

So.  The system ran as follows:

1. The students wrote journal entries describing their math camp experience each day.
2. At morning assembly, one of the coordinators, usually Jeff, would photograph all of the journal entries that were handed in.
3. I would then run an ImageMagick script, which would automatically crop, resize and adjust the color levels on the pictures of the journal entries.
4. We would rename each file (like IMG-000412.JPG) to include the student’s name (like Tom_Denton.jpg), with underscores between the parts of the name.  Also, I would _try_ to rotate each image to upright, but my image-viewing programs seem to handle rotations in funny ways.  (Thus, some of the journal entries are sideways on the blog.  Urg,)  More on that below.
5. A short python script would then do the rest of the work.  Each picture was uploaded automatically (using xmlrpc) to the WordPress site, and the script would then generate a bunch of html to form the body of the post.

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