Andy Chase

I just added about 70 photos to the site. These were all available on the site I began in September of 2001, and sort of disappeared sometime during the spring of 2002.

The earliest photo at the time of this writing was taken on 9/26/1999, an astonishing 4.25 years ago.

Having added the photos to Movable Type using the dates upon which they were taken, the archives now go all the way back to 9/1999, which is somewhat mind-blowing to me.

When I started spending the occasional Saturday or Sunday driving around Los Angeles and taking photos, I had vague aspirations of creating a site like the excellent Roadside Peek, but again and again the prospect of managing such a site statically was just too much of a downer for me to ever make a serious effort. By late 1999 I had come to the conclusion that managing content-oriented websites with static HTML pages was a losing proposition, but lacking PHP and database knowledge at the time I didn't know what to do about it.

So the photos accumulated... first on Zip disks and then on CD-ROMs. Some of the backlog made it onto my 2001 web site, but many, many more photos remain scattered across those old CD's.

Enter iPhoto - A great tool for organizing groups of photos, and Movable Type - a great tool for putting content online. Connectivity between the two is still lacking, but I feel like a solution is in sight, and it will probably involve some combination of AppleScript, ImageMagick and PHP. My holy grail is to manage photographs in iPhoto - import them, label them, add comments, and then run an automated process to take that information from iPhoto, resize the photos for web use, build Movable Type Entry and Excerpt HTML, and push it all to the webserver.

Eric Sigler's jaw-dropping iPhoto2Weblog plugin comes so close, but the current release doesn't quite give me the flexibility I want.

Nevertheless, this is exciting stuff that I couldn't have imagined getting my hands on when I got my Olympus digicam back in 1999. Who knows what this site will look like by the end of 2004?

Nearly two years after I wrote this, journalists are for some reason still scratching their heads over why the unwashed masses enjoy maintaining weblogs.

The latest in-depth look at the lives of teenage bloggers? "My So-Called Blog" by Emily Nussbaum of the New York Times.

I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems.I'm hardly an authority on Weblogs, seeing as I seem to abandon every single one I try to set up or maintain after about 5 entries, but I think that's largely because I haven't been happy with any of the ones available at Sourceforge and other free software sites; systems like Slash and its PHP equivalent PHPNuke are fantastic, but way, way more than I need to run my pissant little waste of bandwidth. I don't need polls, or Slashboxes, or a message board, or 8 dozen pre-defined topics that I'll never use, or the bad, bloated HTML that always winds up in the predefined theme templates. Sure, they're heavily customizable, but to effectively design your own theme you have to learn a whole new API and chances are you'll have to use nasty, crufty HTML to make everything look right and align properly. For that matter, I don't need an extensive user registration or comment moderation system. If (God forbid) I should ever find myself getting enough traffic to warrant a comments and moderation system, I'd just as soon build it myself.

So it comes down to this: It's time to roll my own. I've made abortive attempts at this before, full of convoluted, poorly commented code that I can't even figure out myself six months later, but this time I'd like to approach it as a project that might be of use to somebody else... I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems. It will need to be well-written, easily customizable, and extensible. It will defintely be written in PHP, and it will probably use MySQL for its database, as much as I'd like to use PostgreSQL. (mmmmmm, foreign keys.) Lots more people use MySQL, at least at the time of this writing.

I've learned quite a lot about programming style and programming in general since I started tinkering with PHP at Stan Lee Media, and I've used one hell of a lot of free (as in speech) software in the process. The nagging voice in the back of my mind that tells me I should give something back has been growing steadily, and since I haven't really learned C yet it looks like PHP will be the way I can do it.