Satya's blog - Bins: NIH

My online photo albums are generated using a script called bins. It's a very good piece of software, but recently I've felt that it's too slow. It's also hard to change its templates, and this is not bins' fault. It is because I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote them.

So I set out to write my own bins-work-alike script, which is so far called 'albums'. Only mine's a little slower, isn't internationalised like bins is, and may be more brittle. And it's incomplete. And it's probably not much faster than bins.

On the plus side I can re-do my templates to be cleaner. It also does not use a separate page for EXIF data and it never shows a full-size image on an HTML page -- you will only get thumnail-sized previews until you hit the image details page, which will always give a picture that fits within 640x480 pixels. being my own code, I can also make it do whatever I want.

And NIH means Not Invented Here. It's the factor that makes us re-invent wheels.

Updated: It won't have RSS because this blog is the one-stop RSS for my site.

Last updated: Jan 21 2006 11:59