Re: Alt photo blog
I had a very painful experience last year with a virtual private server company. The lesson is that, avoid cheap service, and don't put all faith in any one company, even the high-end server companies. Server operation and web hosting businesses operate in a very price competitive market, they routinely oversell the server resources, and even then cheap companies may disappear any day. When they disappear, paying extra money for their backup solutions don't mean anything. The next thing. Don't build a system that requires anyone's volunteer work or user participation. People are extremely good at cheering you up but when you have the system up and running for 3 months, your strategy is very important if your goal is to get the site filled with contents by other contributors. Now, the actual system and usability analysis. People who are familiar with Wordpress or any other CMS of similar complexity would be already using them. I think one reason why people prefer to stay here is the simplicity and efficiency of email-based communication. If there were no technical limitations from the network bandwidth and server load, the participants here probably much prefer attachments rather than a parallel system for images. Therefore, it is probably best for this parallel system to be simple to use and email-based from the poster's view. That is, the new parallel system should accept email submissions, extract the attachments, and present them with the text body on a web page. If necessary, image size can be resized at the server side and it should be transparent from the user (perhaps with the exception of the contrast and the color space). Such an interface already exists and widely used among power bloggers. (also used are off-line editors.) One problem here is authentication. I oppose unauthenticated system because it is very easy to be flooded with spams. One solution is to use the From header line of the email (e.g., all list member are allowed), and another solution is to require a password in the Subject line or somewhere in the email, change the password periodically and post the latest password to the list. In making such a system, the data format should be designed to make it portable, that is, not dependent on a particular server and can be copied over to another computer (Linux, Mac or whatever) and still read easily. Although I do not see a mature implementation of this yet, when one becomes available, a CMS based on SQLite rather than client-server model based database system is preferred. I know several CMS and photo gallery platforms are currently undergoing this expansion to work with sqlite, and so using such a system may make the database conversion very easy in the near future. -- Ryuji Suzuki "Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content." (Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl, 1986)
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