Clarity
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been trying to devise some kind of lightweight photoblogging system that would allow me to mostly effortlessly post and briefly document photos of Claire.
I don’t know if I’ve ever had so much trouble designing the basic specifications for how such a simple app would work. Do you store the pictures in the database, or in the filesystem? Is sorting done by date added, arbitrary order, or the date the picture was taken according to the metadata? Are IDs randomly generated, or ordinal based on insertion? Generate and display thumbnails?
The phrase “When in doubt, do without” recently resonated with me, and since then I’ve been interpreting a lot of uncertainty to be signals to suspend an impulse to take some action.
My basic fear is that I will “go enterprise” and over-design the crazy thing. But I might also inadvertently flip and under-design it. What am I really trying to get here?
I want to be able to share photos, a sort of instant photo album. This precludes me just posting pictures on my blog; I want the pictures unsullied by vacuous discussions of how to design picture sharing systems. This makes Picasa and Flickr unappealing, because I don’t want the album/photo hierarchy. I also want to be able to merge the photos as a feed into Efendi for insertion between blog entries, using my fancy system for such things.
I want to be able to put a little description of the photos, but I don’t care about commenting, taxonomy, or any of that stuff.
I also want it to look nice and simple, which also boxes out Picasa and Flickr.
This shouldn’t be so hard for me. Maybe I’ll do without.