About

This site is supposed to be a geographic photo sharing site for travel photographers, featuring photos, journals, and maps, but it's actually just a sandbox for learning about web technology, distributed systems, usability and design.

This is basically a LAMP site, with some AJAX components. Most of the coding is done in PHP, with a MySQL database backend. ImageMagick generates the thumbnails. Apache is the web server, running on Red Hat Linux. The server is hosted by ServePath in San Francisco, co-managed with Scott Leonard.

What started out years ago as a personal home page with travel photos and stories, has turned into a ridiculously large project, numbering some 16,000 lines as of last count. It's all been created from scratch, with a few open source modules, such as xajax, Template (with a few mods by Scott Leonard), getID3(), PHPMailer, ExifTool, SafeHtmlChecker, and iPhotoToGallery for uploading to this site directly from iPhoto. We also use the Google Maps API and the Shutterfly C4P API for ordering prints.

All editing is done in, yes, vi, on a PowerBook G4 running free PHP/MySQL/Apache2 modules for Mac OS X from Server Logistics.

Our goal is to be a not-for-profit self-sufficient personal project, created entirely in spare time while commuting or traveling. If you like what you see, consider a donation. Keep up with the latest development news on the site admin's journal (RSS).

The original LtL logo was created by the talented Alisa Lowden.

Larry the Llama

Larry runs the show here. As in any society, without a domesticated work animal, inefficiency would run rampant and we'd be stuck in the doldrums of a personal home page.

With the help of Larry the Llama, however, this personal web site has grown into a multi-user photo sharing site.

Larry the Llama's role here is pretty straighforward. Since he's not a very good typer, he's been assigned to fetching things. Mostly he fetches requested HTML pages. He also carries query requests and results back and forth between the server and the database. He also keeps tracks of hits by scratching a board with his hooves. He's doing all the work when the developers aren't around.

As you can see, nothing would get done without him. We just have to make sure that we leave enough food out while we're gone, otherwise unpredictable things can sometimes happen. Kim Gustafson

Kim is the code monkey. He also feeds the llama. He spends way too much time adding new features and fixes things when Larry the Llama (occasionally users) notice they are broken. He tries to update the site blog when major things are added or fixed.

Kim is currently travelling in India and SEA for '05/6, maintaining this site from abroad. See his journal for the latest.

If you are looking for a software engineer with over 8 years of hardware & software development experience, project leadership experience, and who knows how to tame a llama, consider hiring him when he is back from Asia in '06.

About the site FAQ Contact us Support us LtL wear Site updates (RSS) © Kim Gustafson - Content copyright their respective owners.

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