Subject:
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Re: 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 19:32:56 GMT
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Viewed:
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680 times
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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 central site
(call it BrickPics) that just shows what “feeds” have been updated. You could
manually update your own XML file to show you’ve got new content.
Maybe the central site would just be links, or thumbnails of only the most
current feeds, like the Brickshelf homepage. But it could be a one-stop
browsing, especially if the content is subdivided into catagories.
Then again, maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about.
-Evil Wayne
In lugnet.general, Joe Strout wrote:
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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 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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| (...) Hmm, that's an interesting idea. So basically, your own site would contain your images plus an XML file that provides metadata for them (description, keywords, category, etc.). You'd register the URL of your XML file with the central server (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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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 (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general, FTX)
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