Believe it or not I’ve been trying to get a webcam working with this site for its entire existence, more than 6 years now. I actually had one running briefly back when I was running this site using windows and IIS, but that experiment didn’t last long (the OS I mean), and neither did the webcam. The problem has been getting appropriate drivers for the webcam working – back in the days of serial cams, no one, and I mean no one, outside of uber uber geeks was working on that stuff, and of course the camera manufacturers paid no attention to producing drivers for Linux. These days lots more folks are producing drivers but it’s still an issue of needing pretty good linux chops and the right camera to get things going. Needless to say, as you can see from the link in the column to the right, I’ve finally managed it. Kudos go out to the following folks:

Christian Magnusson, for his almost working set of drivers for the USB Quickcam Messenger I have.

hugelmopf and the other contributors to the ubuntuforums.org thread that helped me tweak Christian’s script such that it would work on my ubuntu-based box.

Erik Bosrup, and Kathleen More for their javascript, which I used to get the cam pics onto my site.

The webcam pic will update every 3 minutes, though depending on how you’ve set your browser’s cache you may need to force-reload the page to get a new picture to show. If you catch me doing something embarrassing or amusing, send the picture along and I’ll put it in my image gallery.