Tet's Journal: The perils of having customers

A while ago, I became dissatisfied with the available online photo gallery software, so I decided to write my own. And lo, it was good. Or rather, it was a bit rough around the edges (hell, the first version was hacked together in about half an hour), but it did what I needed. Which was all that really mattered. Over the years, it's accumulated more features as I've found extra bits I'd wanted adding. So far, so good. But a few people have seen it and asked for copies. Now I'm not precious about my code, and I'm quite happy for others to use it if they want. But it's not really what you'd call "production quality". And my new found "customers" are finding new and innovative ways to break my code, by asking it to do things it was never designed to do. Which I suppose means I'll have to actually get around to fixing it...

Moral of the story: Avoid having customers. They always want to use your software in ways you never envisaged when you wrote it!

We need a new form of customer

[nizo]

I would prefer one that just gave me money and didn't expect anything in return. Or actually several, since one probably isn't enough. I had a great idea long these lines, but everyone kept using words like "fraud" and "prison" when I described it, so I gave up on it :-(

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

I used to work for London Underground. As we learned on our first day of orientation (from a line manager himself, no less), there's an old joke you need to know: "The trains would run perfectly if it weren't for all the passengers."

Gallery Software

[Captain Splendid]

Yeah, I tried Gallery and Coppermine and a couple of others, but none of them worked the way I wanted. My hack right now is to have Picasa export to HTML via a custom template I modified from one of the stock ones. Ginned up a little index page by hand to link to the respective galleries, and voila. Picasa and FTP do most of the work, all I really have to do is tweak the code of the index page once in a while. Although hardly ideal, it's the perfect mix of automation and handcraft IMO. Besides, this is

Re:

[kent12er]

Thanks for uploading this, it gave me something to read on my lunch break. Free Download http://www.onedownload.org/ [onedownload.org]