Over the weekend, I wrote my own photo-inserting plugin for WordPress. I did my own because I keep all my digital photos in one place (and wanted to keep it that way without having all of them publicly available; I also wanted the mechanism to generate and serve lower-resolution (so lower-bandwidth) versions automatically.

The plugin does that: I start my post with something like “” and the plugin takes care of substituting appropriate XHTML markup to retrieve a thumbnail version of the photo (which it also generates), adding on a secret code that’ll keep people from browsing for similarly-named photos (I might not want you to see IMGP0346 or IMGP0348). The generated markup also includes a little Javascript to pop open a larger (but reduced resolution) view in its own window.

Next step: set up a mechanism to handle incoming mail from my Sidekick, so that I can publish a post with photos automatically.

(That’s Gina and I reflected in the big shiny jellybean in Chicago’s Millenium Park.)

I run this server myself, as an educational experience; I expect that a fair number of posts on this blog will relate to things I’ve learned while working on it. I’ll file these posts in this “Meta” category: blogging about blogging, as well as the other server stuff underneath it.

For now, here’s a list of the mechanisms on this server, many of which will soon be described in more detail in other posts:

• This blog, of course, but also a few other folks’ sites, including Gina’s foodie book club
• My webcam, and the image-processing stuff around it
• A backup mechanism that copies everything to my file server, as well as an offsite location, every night
• A setup mechanism that allows me to rebuild the server from scratch in about an hour, with no interaction
• A mail server, running Postfix, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, etc
• My MythTV backend, which will eventually replace my TiVo
• A Subversion repository (eventually I’ll set up external access to share more of what I’ve made)
• Various other web applications that I’ll describe later (buzzwords: Django & Trac)

The server runs Ubuntu Linux (currently, the Breezy Badger version); it’s a Dell SC-420 Pentium 4 box with 1G RAM and about 300GB storage.

I’ve resurrected my blog. I started writing a couple of years ago, but eventually the posts slowed to a trickle as my impulse to post was swamped by the urge to tinker with the look.

I’ve just spent a bit of time upgrading to WordPress 2.0 and doing my own theme (dig the live photo banner!), and now that I have, the old posts don’t fit. Coming soon: pictures in posts, and of course, Google ads.

Updated 4/4 8AM: Google ads: check!