ampsig installation..
but how do *I* get it to work?
To get your sig working, you will need to take roughly the following steps..
- install a data client for your media player (AMIP, signux, macsig, NowPlaying, etc)
(if you are using AMIP, install cURL somewhere, preferably in your PATH) - install ampsig on your web server (a 'no-ip' type home web server is just fine)
- alter ampsig preferences as desired (many ready-made schemes are provided)
- configure your media player data client's POST settings.
For more information about the preferences and commands you can set, check out the data clients page. - play a song!
- your ampsig is here.. http://yourdomain/path/to/amp.php
And you will need to ensure you have..
- a webserver running php4 with the GD libraries (most hosts have this, go for GD2)
- a decent text editor (utf-8 and unix-savvy, to edit your prefs)
- some common sense (it can be tricky, but with common sense, totally doable!)
Or else get us to host your sig!
uptime reporting..
If you want to utilise ampsig's uptime facility on Windows, put utu.exe and libcurl.dll somewhere handy (like in your PATH, next to curl) and enter the correct AMIP callback for that (usually in the Startup callback) or else create a shortcut somewhere (like your startup items) to run uTu periodically, to keep your ampsig synched with your computer's uptime. On Linux and Mac OS X, signux and macsig handle this automatically.to get ampsig working..
server-side..
First, set your ampsig preferences. global prefs are inside amp.php, visual prefs are in separate "schemes" files. you may want to read through all these notes before you do this.Then drop the ampsig package into your webserver (you don't need to upload the "extras" folder). remember, amp.ini must be "world-writable" (though windows web servers won't care about this, especially servers running on private computers - yes, you can run this at home) on *nix servers, do..
chmod 777 /path/to/amp.ini
(or use your FTP client to set permissions to ALL)better still, make the whole "data" directory writable, future versions of ampsig might do more stuff inside that folder, so this would be good future-proofing.
Now, whenever you play a new track (or pause, stop, exit, etc. ie. an "event"), your data client (AMIP, macsig, signux, etc) will POST this information to ampsig (amp.php), which will suck it up and write it to a file, usually called "amp.ini" inside the "data" folder.
Your HTTPd (webserver) needs to be running php4 (probably php4.2) with the "GD" extensions installed (most commercial web hosts will have this, but pick one with GD2!). If you are brewing your own php, simply add
--with-gd to your config string to have the php-bundled GD libraries leap into
action. In that case, remember you'll need the jpeg/png libraries installed on your system, and
the compiler will need to know how to find them, too.note: older versions of GD don't handle truetype fonts so well, particularly antialiasing.
We class it as "intelligent" because it handles not only the role of data collector, but also of image publisher..
publishing your sig to the world..
in a forum..
Calling ampsig without these magic POST variables gets you the funky generated image. On a forum you could probably use something like this..[img]http://mydomain.com/path/to/amp.php[/img]In forums that don't allow files with .php extensions as images, you can simply do this..
[img]http://mydomain.com/path/to/amp.php/spidey.png[/img] or perhaps..[img]http://mydomain.com/path/to/amp.php/foo.jpg[/img]which ampsig not only doesn't mind, but will in fact use these extra parameters to provide specific ampsig schemes in specific image formats. That's right! Very useful for overriding random schemes and/or default preferences. The two examples above would get you the spidey scheme in .png format, and a random scheme in jpeg format, respectively (unless you actually have a scheme called "foo", of course!)
This ability to override your "default" scheme (which may be "random") is highly useful if you have a particular ampsig that you always want to display in one particular place, and another ampsig for some different place. ampsig will do them all simultaneously!
Of course the VERY BEST way to publish your ampsig in a forum, is like this ;o) ..
[url=http://ampsig.com/][img]http://host.ampsig.com/myname/spidey.png[/img][/url]
email and web..
In an email or web page you can just drop your ampsig URL into a regular image tag, like this.. <img src="http://myhost/path/to/amp.php/iamastar.png" alt="i am a star on this forum" />Which assumes you have some custom "iamastar.scheme" in place. If ampsig doesn't recognise the scheme you requested in the URL it will just spit out its default scheme (or one of your random schemes, if you have it set that way)
