Selecting Base Paths in Thumbscrew

I’m curious if any of you currently use the Web page feature of Thumbscrew. I use it mostly for my blog posts (I use PyBlosxom and use the reStructuredText plugin), and its development has mostly been to scratch my own itch. I’ve seen feedback both in private and on VersionTracker and MacUpdate asking about a few possible features:

• incorporating FTP/WebDAV for actually posting the Web pages

• relative links/base tag/DOCROOT or the like, so the page isn’t riddled with /Users/foo/path/to/thumbnails/

Frankly, I’m a little intimidated by the first part. I’d be much more likely to put something together and send it to MarsEdit or some other app altogether.

The second has me interested, though, and is a bit more exciting from a UI point of view. Here’s my typical workflow, and how I might approach this. After thinking about this in my head for a while, it seems to be an overly geeky solution.

So, here’s my server setup. All my blog posts are somewhere within the hierarchy of /home/zbir/html/blog/ (organized by categories and whatnot). All the images are in /home/zbir/html/images/ (with subdirectories for photos/ and thumbnails/). This whole setup is mirrored on my laptop substituting /home/zbir/html/ with /Users/zbir/Sites/. A typical edited image stanza for me looks like this:

.. |DSCN5380| image:: images/thumbnails/DSCN5380_thumbnail.png
   :target: images/photos/DSCN5380.jpg

And the template that renders the final page on the server specifies a which allows me to use relative paths like that. It’s so far been a small enough amount of work to just do a find/replace for the first part of those paths and wipe them out, but I would love to have Thumbscrew do it all for me.

One solution I’ve imagined is this. Say you take the two paths (one for thumbnails and one for originals), and find the full path that is at least shared between them. For my setup, that shared path would be ‘/Users/zbir/Sites/images’. Now, I could come up with a UI that presents those elements in a way that allows you to select the base path as far as your web server is concerned, like the Finder does:

In my case, ‘images’. Once that is selected, then the paths formed when applying the template would trim off everything up to that base path.

Does this make sense at all? If no one really uses the Web page features from Thumbscrew, I’ll probably implement something like this and just use it myself.