A recent scroll through my blog posts got me thinking about the personal projects I’ve worked on in recent years. Last month I built my own wifi router over a three week period. It was invigorating. Similarly hardware-related, I came across a three-year-old blog post from when I built my current desktop PC. It still meets my needs quite nicely so I’ve no need to upgrade, which is a nice feeling. On the software side, a much older project is a web application I call Tracker. It’s something I use roughly 355 days a year.

Tracker

I’ve been using tracker in some form since January 2008. It houses my daily journal entries, project ideas, URLs that I find important. This blog post also began life there. There are currently 3800 entries in my database, and 7400 usages of 801 unique tags. I plan to keep using it for years to come.

This year, Tracker got a new sibling. It’s also a web application, but one built specifically for hosting and sharing photos. I call it Collections.

Collections

Update: The code has been released here, with links to screenshots in the readme.

I’ve had a Flickr account for a few years now, but never fully embraced it. I find Flickr’s concept of collections and sets confusing, and I very rarely share photos with non-family members. So I decided to build something I had more control over, that stored images on my own server.

The code isn’t public yet (yes it is, see link above). There are a few features I need to add, and some usability cleanups to do first.

Goals

  • Self-hosted
  • Tags for organization
  • Simple UI for choosing which photos to share
  • Unique, unguessable URLs for sharing each curation. I can simply email a link to my family.
  • Serve as off-site photo backup
  • Android app that uploads photos nightly

The main thing missing from Collections is an accompanying android app that uploads photos nightly. It won’t be a huge undertaking to create the first version of the app, but I’ve been distracted by my beagleboard wifi router and a toy micro-services framework lately. Bookmark my blog or follow me on github if you want to know when I release it.