Guess I need a photoblog

Seems like people like the idea of me keeping a photoblog. Now the question is how do I want to do it. I can use something like Flickr, Pixelpost, or Buzznet and just have a place that stores photos. Or I could do what I really want and have something more like Deceptive Media where a new photo is pushed at most once a day.

For some reason I really want a site that doesn't act like storage for photos but a place people go back to on a nearly daily basis to see what new photo I have taken. So I would have it set up so that there was the new photo for the day (assuming I keep up with taking photos), a limited archive that goes back a set number of days (probably two weeks), and that's it. There would be small thumbnails to the archives, a decent sized version for the photo you are viewing, and then the ability to view the original photo. I would want each photo to have a mention of what the photo is of, who took it, with what camera, and possibly a timestamp.

I can implement this on my own. Using something like Django, TurboGears, maybe something even like Links. Question is whether I want to bother with the coding it myself since that means designing my own page layout. That can be painful since that starts to delve into my creative, artistic side that is not very forgiving when it comes to not getting it exactly the way my mind pictures it.

But I suspect that I will have to implement it myself. This means a couple of things. One is that I don't want it to take a huge amount of disk space on the server. While I am sure I can get a ton so space from the OCF, I just don't want to abuse it. And since I want this photoblog to be more transient in terms of the material instead of archival, it just goes along with that idea. And a DB back-end is out of the question because I don't want to have to deal with it; simple XML or Python pickle files along with the filesystem is all I want to have to deal with.

Another design consideration is that I don't want to have to maintain it on a daily basis. Since I tend to take photos in batches I would want to be able to do a batch update of new photos that are slowly (and automatically) published. So, for instance, I want to be able to upload 5 new photos and have them slowly made the current photo over the next five days without me having to do anything on a daily basis to make that happen.

And the last thing is I want the automation and maintenance to be as simple as possible. I am thinking of sticking a ton of photos into a directory, running a program that asks me to enter info about the new photos, and then letting it handle setting up the rest of the web site.

The basic design I am thinking of is pretty simple. Have a directory where I just dump new photos. I run a script that checks the directory, pops open each photo, and then one by one has me fill in the relevant photo information. After that the info and photos get uploaded to the server. There, a cron job (assuming I can set one up on the OCF, don't remember) will just run a script on the server that will update the pages of the site to reflect what the newest photo should be. Nothing fancy; just enough to get the photos up for people to see and to keep it easy enough that I am willing to do this. =)