The basic idea of Spoejs is an image-oriented blog/journal. Spoejs can be used not only for storing pictures, but also for journaling of stories in a diary style. Or a combination thereof.

There are web sites that allow you to upload one picture a day, or that allow you a limit quota. What we are writing is for larger volume picture collections. This project is geared more toward people with home networks or who otherwise admin their own personal servers.

We imagine the typical situation is a tech kid with his/her own Linux server(s) at home installing spoejs and letting family and friends post large picture collections from summer BBQ’s, ski trips, parties, vacations and so on.

Since we are imagining this to be used not only by the tech kids themselves but also family and friends, this means that it should be easy to use for non-tech people. We intend the interface for uploading pictures, writing stories and annotations to have a very low learning curve. For those that need it, there’ll also be basic photo editing options such as rotation, cropping and adjusting brightness.

Our choice of technology is Perl and Mason. We write .pm modules to control data, and write Mason code to embed data into HTML. We use a few Apache features. We run a squid cache in front of Apache for caching scaled pictures, etc. That way we don’t have to do much caching inside Mason, improving performance.

Our data is stored as media and text files in the file system. We have a format for text files that looks like xml, but is easier to read and edit in a text editor. We have chosen this so that it is indeed to hand edit and to tar up to move to a different server if necessary.

Development so far is this: Sauber designed the structure of the code and Snicki has covered implementing modules. Boinger wrote this little web site, and will start on the documentation once there is an alpha release. We have no specific schedule and requirements for people joining development. Instead we try to be open to any people who would like to participate, and we accept participation at all levels.