Subject:
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Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Tue, 7 Jun 2005 19:20:36 GMT
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Viewed:
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1522 times
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Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Brickshelf goes away or stops
accepting new uploads. Further suppose that, as a community, we deem it wise to
develop something that is decentralized open-source, so that our valued LEGO
images and other media can have a permanent home, even as individual ALEs
(including those originally running the service) come and go.
I can imagine a couple different forms such a next-generation service might
take:
1. Custom app with peer-to-peer storage: a cross-platform app could be written
to share images in a fashion similar to gnutella, napster, etc., but specialized
for our own purposes. You’d launch this app, and it would connect to the
network if possible and download recently added/changed metadata (keywords,
thumbnails, and so on -- small bits of data on each image or folder). This
metadata would be stored locally, and could be searched even when offline.
Click on something you want to see more closely, and it connects to one or more
machines that has the full data. You can then choose how long to keep the full
data on your machine; if you think it’s valuable, keep it forever, and if you
think it’s junk, let it cycle out after a day or two or when your local cache
exceeds some limit you could set. This same app would be used for uploading
your own images, of course. If you have the app running when somebody else
uploads something, you could get an immediate notice. If we really want to get
wild and crazy, we could even have a mini-chat feature where you can see who is
browsing the same folders as you, and talk with them.
As you can tell, I think this is a pretty cool idea. :) Images could
eventually disappear if nobody thought it valuable enough to keep, but I bet
there are at least a couple of ALEs in the world who would buy a big hard drive
and keep almost everything, so that would be rare. The chief drawback to this
approach is that you couldn’t link to these files from a web page, such as a
LUGNET announcement. (Hmm, unless we provide some web server gateway, which
doesn’t support browsing or searching but just serves up images by their URL.
That’s possible.)
Anyway, on to option 2...
2. A web server, perhaps hosted someplace like SourceForge where administration
tasks are easily shared and transferred as needed. Users would browse and
update via the Web, as they do with Brickshelf. Except that, I don’t think we
can make this work as an open-source effort unless the actual images are not
stored on the server -- that’s just too much bandwidth to pay for, in a model
where nobody gets paid. So, the images would have to be stored elsewhere,
hither and yon, and this server would just act as a central indexer.
This is probably easier than option 1, at least in some ways. The main problem
is that it’s more work to upload or update your stuff; first you have to find
your own host for your images, and upload them there, and then update the
central index with the appropriate URL, description, and keywords.
This approach is also subject to server overload -- such as what is apparently
causing mocpages.com to be unreachable right now. :) The peer-to-peer network
of option 1 is much less susceptible to that.
Just some thoughts... any comments?
Best,
- Joe
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Message has 4 Replies:
 | | Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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| Oh, that's freakish. I was just thinking that maybe it could work like iPodder or other aggregators. Where you'd upload a simple XML file that contains all the details of your content. Your pics would be hosted on your own site, but there could be a (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general, FTX)
| | | Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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| (...) I definitely like the idea, although I would encourage it to be more generic than "lego-specific". Something that other online groups could use for sharing images, etc., if they so wanted. A couple issues I can think of: - If an owner of an (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general)
| | | Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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| In lugnet.general, Joe Strout wrote: (snip) (...) Simply put, LEGOFan has actually been thinking about a tagging resource that very much resembles what you have described in #2 and would be happy to host a central index. Joe Meno Media Contact (...) (19 years ago, 8-Jun-05, to lugnet.general, FTX)
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