What is it?
https://www.kachline.net/
Over the years, I have written a script which take our family photos and presents those both on the web, as well as screens around the house. In this particular writeup, I will discuss “kachline.net” or my “picture script”.
How long has this script been around?
Answer: 1999
“Picturescript” first came to life as a perl script at around 1999, coincidentally when we purchased our first digital camera. Since then, this script has gone through numerous updates and an eventual re-write into python in 2016. Picturescript is still actively used and maintained today.
Why write this?
Yes, I could have chosen from a number of pre-authored (and much more beautiful) pre-authored modules, however, driving this project are a few goals….
Learning
What is the point of writing a script when you could easily download from a number of existing scripts? Answer: To keep learning!
Technologies used throughout my kachline.net script include (but are not limited to): HTML, CSS, Python, Bootstrap, jQuery, JSON-LD, Google Tag Manager and Opengraph.
Longevity
I want our family photos on a platform which I can maintain for decades to come. Kachline.net came to be somewhere around 2000 and is still running today so far, so good. (R.I.P Panoramio)
Simplicity of Use
I want a script who’s output is simple and effective.
Simplicity of Software
A key tenant to software development which I hold; the less there is to maintain, the less there is to break. My kachline.net script uses Python exiftool and imagemagick for 95% of all work performed. No fancy servers, no databases, or fancy libs. Just basic tools which have been available with any linux distro for years.
Security
By serving up ONLY static HTML content, there is no immediate or long term risk of script, or SQL related attacks. It’s difficult to attack something which is not there.