18th Jun 2003
Enough There For Now
There’s been a nagging feeling at the back of my mind, as projects have cropped up to consume time.
“When am I going to get back to FlexiPhoto?” (my web-based photo database project)
One of the projects has been writing up the idea of URLs that express location and time. That work is at ThereAndThen.org. There is enough there to explain how it all works, what constitutes a valid TT URL, and so on.
ThereThen originated as a feature I want to put into FlexiPhoto. It’s the idea of searching photos (and making transient “exhibitions”) by location and/or time. Once I came up with TT addressing, it sucked me right out of programming, and took on a life of its own! In this case, it was a very good thing, because the concept applies to many things outside of photos, and taking the time to write about it helped me generalize it, and make it adhere to established standards. It will be a feature in FlexiPhoto, though not one of the first ones I am getting to this month.
I’m back on FlexiPhoto now, and happy to be there. I’ll post more in the coming weeks and months about its progress. The real brief description is that it is a web-based photo database (PHP, MySQL, Apache). A prototype version used to be up on one of my sites - it now handles multiple UIs, languages, and much more. One strong point for FlexiPhoto is the ability to blend into an existing set of web pages, without “looking” like a database underneath. For instance, it easily enables navigation around a collection (previous, next, bigger, smaller, up to collection) without cluttering up a page with arrows (though you can certainly have a bunch of visual doodads if you want)
The first customer for FlexiPhoto will be my wife, who is a great photographer and digital image consultant (an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop). She’s at SusanPrice.com Give her a visit!
