Why I post pictures that make no sense to you? Because I like it. It really is as simple as that.
Why my own application? Because I like it (and it's awesome!). I've gained some significant experience by doing this. No silly ads, no slow loading site. I'm happy to be the one in control; they're my pictures and they remain mine. Easy to backup and archive.
Why such a poor design? I'm a developer, geek, maintainer but unfortunately not a talented graphic designer.
I got the idea to host my own pictures because Twitpic had been messing things up pretty bad for me lately (april 2011). I'd accepted the lack of responsiveness, having to refresh the pages a couple of times just to be able to look at some pictures and then wait some more. But then Twitpic started to annoy me by either not processing the sent picture at all or just process a tiny part of the picture. Here are some pictures processed by Twitpic's e-mail interface to prove my point:
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| Nice. | Great job. | Awesome. |
I was getting fed up with them and that led me to this.. thing.. I created. Somewhere around april in 2011, I decided to create my own application to process pictures more easily.
Using a Nokia phone at the time, I thought it would be wise to choose a picture upload method that would at least be somewhat future-proof. I decided to go for e-mail (because any phone would support that). All I do is send an (TLS encrypted) e-mail to my 't.sanexeh.nl' e-mailaddress and write the text to post into the subject field. There has to be at least one picture attached to that e-mail. Then I let my server do some magic.
A brief little history..
When I started setting up this site I was using an SMTP server (MailEnable Professional 6) with a pickup-event in VBScript (which detaches the attachment, strips the subject) firing up the PHP5.3 CLI with oAuth to post. I created this website in classic ASP with the help of IIS6 (webserver), AspThumb (for resizing/creating thumbnails) and IIRF (URL-rewriting) on Windows Server 2003 shared webhosting at the company I worked for.
September 2013 was the moment I decided to move this project to my own Windows Server 2012 VPS. This also meant upgrading to IIS8 and PHP5.5. I switched to hMailServer instead of MailEnable, because I didn't own a Professional license of MailEnable at that time, and the Standard edition does not support SSL. I added support for SSL (https) on the website and I added support for IPv6 (yep,
!). Don't worry about legacy though, this website is still running in classic ASP.In january 2015, I purchased a MailEnable Professional license and switched the picture processing back from hMailServer to MailEnable. I ditched IIRF and moved to Helicon Ape for rewriting URL's. Later that month I made sure the domain sanexeh.nl was signed by DNSSEC. Then I found out I didn't actually use MailEnable instead of hMailServer. Oh well.
Everything is still running strong on my Windows Server 2019 VM. I, however, CBA to update this little 'why page' anymore, so it's either still running with the same specs or I've changed so much. I still love every minute I spent creating this.
Still occasionally thinking about creating an app instead of using SMTP though.