Good question. There are two answers.
1. You can embed your project into another website by following these guidelines.
2. This website is powered by the ScratchR Platform which you will be able to download and run it on your own web server.
By the way, do you want to run your own server because of proxy issues in schools?
Thanks a lot for asking!
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1) The instructions to post projects on my website are great, thanks.
2) I want to build a community around my students work using Scratch, but also using Python, Comic Life, etc. So I want all there work in one place rather than spread around on several websites. Proxy servers are not an issue for me.
Regarding helping with the server, I would like to, but I doubt I will have time in the near future. But I definitely want to congratulate you on Scratch. It's changed the way I teach programming.
-Winston
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How might I find out how to extract the name, comments, and thumbnail of games from a .SB file?
I'm writing a page that will automatically find *.sb file and load them as applets. ( http://stratolab.com/misc/students/lab_spring_07/ ). Right now I take screenshots manually and add them in as thumbnails. It's quite tedious. It looks like a thumbnail is encoded in the .SB file. Can you give me any hints on how to get that out of the file, or will I have to reverse-engineer it?
-ww
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Thank you. Regards Hadbor
andresmh wrote:
Good question. There are two answers.
1. You can embed your project into another website by following these guidelines:
http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/embed
2. This website is powered by the ScratchR Platform which you will be able to download and run it on your own web server. We developed this platform with the goal of making it available to anyone under an open source-friendly license. Right now the code is not ready to be open sourced but if you are interested and want to help just let me know.
By the way, do you want to run your own server because of proxy issues in schools?
Thanks a lot for asking!
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stratolab: right now we do not have an easy way of extracting the thumbnail. The way it is working now is that Scratch sends the thumbnail along with the .sb file at the moment of uploading.
I think you could benefit from hosting the projects on our site and link them from your site. You can have the images and the .sb hosted here or even embed the projects on your page like others have done:
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=258
If none of this work for you, I would suggest again to look at hosting a Scratch sharing server in-house. You can configure Scratch so that it uploads to your site not this site.
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You need to have a machine with Apache, MySQL and PHP running. Once you have that please e-mail me at andresmh -at- media.mit.edu and I share the code.
I feel good and bad about this. On one hand is great to see people running our sharing platform (which we call ScratchR), the original intent was to develop it so others will use it. On the other hand, it would be sad not to have your projects on this open website. We believe that an important part of Scratch is to be able to share and learn from others around the world, not just from a small closed community.
I imagine in the future we could implement a synchronization mechanism that would let other sharing servers automatically upload content to this website (scratch.mit.edu).
I would like to know your thoughts on all this.
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Fix the gallery mechanism so that teachers can limit a gallery to just their own students and you'll find a lot more willingness for classes to use your server.
(Also, having a more explicit policy about plagiarism that doesn't just say "anything goes" might be more palatable to teachers who are fighting a losing battle against students who believe that copying stuff off the net is the same as writing it themselves.)
You've heard me ranting before about the ways in which the gallery metaphor is flawed---with owners of galleries having no control over content, so I won't repeat it here, but I think some of the impetus for other sharing servers is the desire to have some control over what stuff is posted.
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How might I find out how to extract the name, comments, and thumbnail of games from a .SB file?
I am thinking of throwing together a bit of PHP code to etxract the .sb file info (author, description, save history). Is that something that would be useful to others? It is a quite simple format at the top of the file. Although I suppose it could change in the future, the Scratch save version is stored, so you can determine that easily enough (it did not change between 1.0.0 and 1.0.2 for example.
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Hi pkimelma-
Yes, I would love to see your code to extract the author and description. Once I know that, I might be able to hack the thumbnail out too. Although andresmh says the thumbnail is not in the file, I suspect it is because the word "thumbnail" is always there, and also when you click on a .sb in Scratch's open dialog, you see a preview. I would suspect this preview is an image loaded quickly from the file rather than rerendered each time a file is selected.
-winston
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pkimelma: I think the PHP code will be extremely useful. If you make the PHP code available I would also use it to allow people to upload projects from the website itself. The Scratch .sb file does contain the thumbnail inside.
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a url is the address that you type in to go to a website.
scratch.mit.edu and www.google.com are both URLs
Paulmedwal
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How would one upload to an external ScratchR site?
eyra
Last edited by AngelEyra (2007-07-25 17:44:29)
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AngelEyra, instructions for embedding an applet to your website can be found at http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/embed You still must upload your project to scratch.mit.edu but you can add the applet to your own page...btw, good job adding the text box to the flagging system
Jacobo, go to the page of the project that you want to add, then look at its URL. That is the url that you put in the applet.
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Thanks.
eyra
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legal, yes. possible, no.
eyra
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How about a server detection utility?
[blocks]<if><( <{ Server }> <=> www.stratolabs-server.com )>
<say[ Welcome to stratolab's server. ]>
<end>
<if><( <{ Server }> <=> scratch.mit.edu )>
<say[ Welcome to the Scratch web site. ]>
<end>[/blocks]
Last edited by Bingo_324 (2007-08-21 04:10:57)
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i embedded it to here
http://www1.freewebs.com/monksarecool1/New%20Text%20Document.htm
Last edited by Qwertymana (2007-09-29 12:07:54)
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