Sadly, its name was not "Babe"

[drwex]

In other news, what are people using for image sharing these days? The plusterfuck has invaded Picasa and rendered it nearly unusable (I can't just share a photo, I have to "post" and manage sharing on my posts and blah blah whocares and make sure you remember to turn off whatever Google thinks is its clever photo-processing hoo-hah). Imageshack wants paid signs-ups, pfui. Flickr? Pinterest? What's the most usable for quick photo shares?

Comments

[drwex]

I didn't ask this last time publicly and don't feel obliged to answer, but I'm curious how you value your time. I estimate you probably make north of a quarter-million a year and using the heuristic of thousands/year ~= dollars/hr I'd value your time then at $250/hr. So if we say "almost zero time" is half a day then you've used time valued at $1000. The number of hours of daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance involved is likely also non-zero but regardless, I'd guess that you could get a year's worth of the services we've discussed for under $250.

I therefore have to ask what form of rationality explains the choices you make. I guess there are values placed on accomplishment and self-satisfaction, or other enjoyment you get from doing this?

[wotw]

Long ago, I wrote a script that takes the contents of a directory and produces html code to display the contents of that directory. The Baitcon web page I pointed to resulted from running that script. It took about a minute to produce.

Writing the script took perhaps a few hours, but I've amortized that cost over many dozens of web pages since then.

The alternative was spending several hours figuring out which public service to use (as you are doing now), and then having to deal with the hassle of having the rug pulled out from under me when those services disappeared or substantially changed their features.

So it still seems to me that on balance, my financial costs, my time costs, and my aggravation costs have all been much lower as a result of doing all this myself. And as I watch you deal with the what-do-I-do-now problem, I believe that more strongly than ever.

Another advantage of doing it myself is that I understand my script and therefore understand the code on my web pages, which means that if I want to change their appearance, I can do it easily without having to figure out Picasa's or Flickr's interface (if the changes I want to make are even possible there). So that's another time-and-aggravation saver.

Your mileage of course may vary, as different people have different aggravations they prefer to avoid. But for me, the solution has always seemed clear: Pay Bluehost a small amount to deal with the hosting, and write my own html code, or better yet, write my own scripts that I can use to generate LOTS of html code.

If there are costs you think I'm overlooking, or benefits of the Flickr/Picasa route that you think I'm overlooking, I want to hear about them. I am always happy to hear about ways to make my life even easier.

[drwex]

So you're paying for hosting of domains, and they provide you with a Web server that serves up your HTML pages. So the question then comes down to the tradeoffs of writing one's own code versus using a vendor's code. That's sort of the classic build vs buy decision. So long as you can write the features you want and your desires for them don't change it's likely the case that build makes more sense.

The features I want (image resizing, slideshow capability, the ability to permission and link individual items as well as collections) are things I could do but don't want to be bothered with. I'm pretty sure I could script P'shop to do the sizing and the rest would be a reasonably easy set of PHP coding. Scripting the upload might be a little more annoying, but that could be a manual process.

I make less than you do, but let's ballpark that at $500 of my time to do this work. If I say it's taken me $100 of my time to select a vendor (so far it's been less but eventually) then over some number of years I'd pay out that $400 worth to have someone else provide the code and services I want. I then estimate the probability of the vendor failing or changing its features versus the probability that I'd have to go in and tweak or maintain/expand my own code.

So at some point in the future, it's likely that the "buy" decision turns out to be more expensive, assuming an otherwise-static world. I think I expect things to be more problematic and less static than you find them to be, but I understand your reasoning better now.