The downfall of Flickr
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Software
Yes, that’s right…
Every night I creep down to my tool shed and find the hidden trap door, which leads to a dark and dreary room with nothing but a lone bookshelf that I feel my way towards. I depress the hidden button which slowly but surely starts the mechanics that proceed to revolve both me and the bookshelf, all the time creaking and complaining, as I emerge into a laboratory that one could only associate with a mad scientist.
Creative writing aside, and on to the topic at hand.
Flickr is an amazing web site; or service, or application, depending on what floats your Web 2.0 boat. If one is looking for a reliable, easy to use, method of sharing their pictures Flickr is definitely the first name that comes to mind. It is my own opinion of course, but I have spent an extensive amount of time looking at various sites and hosting solutions and while some are very good, very few - if any, can match Flickr in all areas. Not to mention the enormous Flickr community, that as of this writing is uploading approximately 5000 pictures a minute to the Flickr servers.
But after saying all that, I do have some personal gripes with the service, mainly when it comes to the browsing experience. In trying to make Flickr as easy to use as possible, it has been made into an experience that is extremely limiting to someone of my particular nature.
A couple of examples that come to mind are:
- Inability to fully customize the photostream layout
- Mass organization becomes harder as one adds more pictures to his account
- Tagging of pictures is extremely hard to do online when you have more than a few to deal with
- Hidden and/or poorly documented features, (eg. search via multiple tags, hidden layouts)
- Interface in general is hard to navigate for a new viewer
- No offline sorting/editing applications
- No advanced tag management services, (eg. syncing with local images, create albums that auto propagate with tags)
So I have come to the decision that instead of further aggravating myself while using Flickr, I shall instead rely on building my own CMS to host my family pictures. To achieve this end, I have chosen Drupal (at least to start with), as it has an excellent user community and has very active development under works. Drupal has also been an active participant in Google’s Summer of Code since its kick off in 2006, if they’re good enough for Google - they’re good enough for me :P
I can’t wait to implement OpenID into my Image Gallery!
Now in the past I’ve had some horrible experiences with Drupal, namely due to its development cycle. I installed the latest version of Drupal, but all the essential modules were for the previous version, which just caused huge amounts of frustration. And even last night, I made the same mistake of installing Drupal version 6.3, as that’s the latest version..but all the essential modules are still only on Drupal 5.x (Which ironically is the version that they didn’t work for me before).
So I started over and went with the stable release of the last major version, and things have been going extremely smoothly. I expect something to be in production in the next week or two.
Regarding the blog theme, I was in a little frustrated mood and so decided to change the colouring to vent my frustration.
Drupal
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
Well as the initial excitement of starting yet another site has worn off, my posts have slowed down considerably.
But fret not, for I will still be around from time to time with a brief window into my world.
Currently I’m experimenting with Drupal:
Drupal (pronounced /ˈdruːpəl/) is a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. A CMS is a tool used by Web administrators to automatically track online visitors and prepare customized content for consumption, usually as HTML-based Web pages. Drupal, like many modern CMSs, allows the system administrator to customize the content and display of the Web site with little or no programming.
- Wikipedia
So as you can see, lots of promise.
I hope to build an online interactive identity for my local Air Cadet Squadron, but it will probably take me a month to build a complete site.
